Broken Revised
by Invariant
Summary: *Re-post* "..betrayal drives her violence, a sudden rage bent on decimation. All around her are traces of an unwelcome intruder and the disgust was sickeningly painful." Olivia's personal conflicts through Marionette to 6B. Complete. Rated T for language.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. I simply love to create many and varied universes with them.**

**Author's Note: But Invariant..., you say, ...you've already posted this! You're right!, I respond, but I hadn't read it beforehand and when I'd finally gotten around to doing so, I'd found it hard and quite difficult to digest given the copious spelling/grammatical errors in the original version. Even if it was my very first Fringe Fanfiction, there's no excuse that I'd gotten lazy about making sure it was precise. So very, very sorry for that...*blush***

**So, I would very much like to take this moment to apologize for not having realized, at the time this was previously posted, of the benefit of insuring my work is proof-read for mistakes. I decided to re-post this in its much easier flowing form cause, if any of you guys are like me, you like reading the stories you like over and over again. Thought this would be an easier to handle is all. I sure know it is for me. **

**(((Big Fringe-y hugs to all you guys!))))**

* * *

**Marionette**

* * *

There's a larger delight today, in the dark roast of beans between her fingers.

Olivia takes another sip and swallows the full-bodied heat of sugary nectar, chasing the plastic lid with a tiny curve of her lips.

It's been her second cup today, her twelfth this week.

And she nestles the coffee.

In her hands isn't 16 ounces of prime java but a symbolic vessel, an associated object of all the tiny pleasures she once took for granted.

Yellow gold beats against her cheek, her cup and the table, bathing the hospital's cafeteria in organic light.

It's never seemed more beautiful then today, the sunshine, and though age and use have worn them, when Olivia curls her toes in her shoes, they've never felt more new.

Since she's come back, she's been like this, swelled with fresh appreciation for small wonders.

Too bad, to get her here, demoralization had to ride the coat tails of her contentment.

She had the composure of her once life disrupted by another touching, breathing version of herself, leaving behind her faint presence in dirty dishes and damp towels.

Her apartment whispered of a life spent that she never lived. Eight weeks of time lost here to a hell lived in a world different and confusing, void of the personified compass that directed her to reality and brought her back home.

She'd opened her eyes to this world on the figure of Peter, sitting next to her hospital bed, waiting for her to focus and wake.

As she's come to learn, Peter's array of emotion has a way of betraying him, by a beautiful indentation of flesh, a crease of muscle once formed by inner demons to sit forever between his brows. That morning worry and concern had etched the deep line, and it wasn't the pillow's plastic feathers that tickled her neck.

As over there, she felt him, pulsing through her veins, a heated hum searing under her skin to burn her every nerve ending. He was an offense to her independence by cursing through her life-blood,contracting her heart muscle, pumping his name in whispers of pins that pricked her flesh.

They have a way of digging in, numbing her.

She'd stepped this morning from Broyle's car and saw Peter, his welcome back subduing the linger of unease pressurizing her eardrums.

Then he'd been behind her, a walking heat, sensitizing her with needles shot to her fingertips.

He'd become her anticipatory nervousness, a future promise, the vow to an over there plea that he come back for her, be with her, understand the made for him magnetic force that stands her every down-hair on end.

The whispering pull questions logic and reason, to result in only one answer; she belongs to him, and she can feel it.

A phantom numbness digs into her arms and she didn't have to look up to know he was nearing.

Dr. Ross is still in surgery, he announces, and she suggests they wait as he takes a seat. Peter's noticed her coffee profusion and remarks on it. Olivia smiles, explains.

"Well, it's nice to be able to take a cup of coffee for granted."

She turns the cup, spins it's ridges under her fingertip, a tone-arm to the white plastic grooves recording her thoughts.

Other fingers have rummaged through and added to her life's Pandora's Box, marble heavy prolific troubles weighing down her past, daring to crush her if revelation's hand hadn't reached out to save her.

Splendor has a way of burrowing, hiding under all the hard burdens. If she'd realized this sooner, maybe smiles and laughter would've come a little easier; in the way they seem to be now.

"You know when you go on vacation and you get back and some things are a revelation?" she says, "like coffee or my favorite shoes...And then other things are just...I don't know..."

Unimportant? Trivial? Back-burnered in the moments her jacket feels softer?

She can't pinpoint what she wants to say, so she let's the thought go.

"My mail was opened."

She pictures the demolished envelopes, creased papers with her address and information, opened by a stranger with her name.

"It's kind of disconcerting knowing someone else has been living your life."

If acclimating an alternate existence hadn't been a shared role, she'd have trouble grasping the depth. A knife of experience had sliced the unfathomable, bleeding the her of two worlds, and turned the uncustomary routine through crimson lies of pseudo-science.

She remembers at night when she shivers, the ghostly cold of a concrete cell trapping memories she fights to forget.

Olivia wonders how effortlessly, how easily, her alter ego can dream.

When she focuses on Peter, he seems nervous, uneasy, rubs his face without smoothing that beautiful line.

"Hey," she prods, curious. "You okay?"

His eyes are grey-green, lost somewhere she can't find, but he nods.

She'd think him empathizing for her, if she didn't, for some instant, peculiar reason, feel ashamed.

"There's something that I have to talk to you about. About her."

A heavy seriousness now weighs his brow, deepens that crease, and she braces herself.

"I noticed changes." he tells her, "Small changes but they were definitely there. She's..." he grins, when a secret memory flashes across his face,"..she's much quicker with a smile. Less... I don't know, less intense maybe."

His words aren't surprising, and maybe expected, but apprehension begins poking at her ribcage.

"She said that when she was over there, she saw her other life. It made her want to change, to be happier. And I believed her." He says, "Because that made sense."

It's understandable isn't it? And sickly familiar. Hadn't she, after all, reacted the same?

There was no way for him to know she'd been dopple-ganged. It had happened so fast she can still feel the whiplash.

"It's okay, I'm here now."

Her words are weighted with promise, hope, and though she's smiling, he's still anxious.

"When you asked me to come back to this world with you, you said-"

"That you belonged with me."

Olivia ducks her head, blushing, a schoolgirl caught by her shy admission.

"So I came back for you." he tells her. "For us."

For a moment, her smile widens, then there's a betraying awareness, a dull overtaking of hollowness that raps through her body.

_Oh god._

"And we started seeing each other." he confirms, and quickly her apprehension has grown heavy, unbearable, it's leaded her bones and threatens to break her.

He explained away the differences, _her_ differences, because their relationship had changed. The words ring, when he tells her this, press against her eardrums with a cranial headache of realization.

_Oh god, they'd slept together. Oh god._

She couldn't feel anymore her toes or the cup in her hands.

She was numbed, instantly paralyzed by the invisible fingers gripping her soul.

"I thought she was you, Olivia."

His eyes are pleading, more gray now then blue, maybe sad, urging her to understand and it occurs to her, slowly, that that earlier shame hadn't been hers.

She'd felt what was his.

"Does everyone know?" she questions, her voice quiet.

"I reported everything when I found out who she was."

It was too much, too suffocating, so she blocks the pain with nothingness, a reflex barrier shielding her from incoming emotion.

"Olivia..." he continues, leans on the table. "I'm sorry."

She swallows, hard, and shakes her head.

"You know, she had a very full life. A really sweet boyfriend, and if he hadn't been out of town, then who knows what could've happened."

It's a lie, she knows, but it's sweet to the ears of that barrier to say he could have come second to her, too.

"She had friends, people who loved her. People who risked thier lives to help her."

That nothingness is feeling a little bit bigger, squeezing just a little bit harder. And when she speaks again, her words come a little bit faster.

"They all believed that I was her so, you know, I-I-I can understand how that -"

The nurse cuts off her words, nullifying the excuse. Peter asks the woman to give them a second, but Olivia is thanking God and Buddha and even William fucking Bell for the interruption.

"Peter, it's fine." she says, forcing a smile. "We're good. Let's go."

She get's up, not wasting a second, and though she wants to run far from here, and him and the fizzle of his goddamn electricity, she straightens her back and follows the nurse.

On the table, her coffee sits forgotten, a warm comfort lost in the cold of her wake.

* * *

Ink scorches Olivia's nape.

Under her fingers, red and black burn like coals on her neck, a star holding proof of a different existence, a separate life; a prison tattoo from the over there world.

She can't scrub it off or wipe it away. She's marked forever with colors not hers, pigments laced with a contempt that lines her throat with bile, and her tongue with acid.

She stands before her closet, in scratchy dark cotton.

Her wardrobe affixes her stare, taunting her with neutrals of black and white, dull fabrics that hammer on the backside of her madness.

She remembers_ her_ closet, the other one's.

Hung were bright colors, analogous shades in blues and reds and she questions if that's what he wants, prefers, colors over darks, laughter over ferocity; the her who's intensity influences not her eyes, but her smile.

She yanks a blouse from it's wooden hanger, wrings the fabric, pictures for a moment that her standing here deciding, wondering of three quarter sleeves or full.

She feels violated, stripped numb, emotionally molested by her mirror image. _Her_ fingerprints stain these clothes, her house, his skin, and Olivia's anger surfaces, hotly raw and intense.

The blouse hits the floor before it's counterparts. Fast and driven she rips her clothes from the closet, tears threaten but she blinks away the wet heat.

Betrayal drives her violence, a sudden rage bent on decimation. All around her are traces of an unwelcome intruder and the disgust was sickeningly painful.

She wants to rid her closet, her room, her life of that woman and her fucking easy laughter and undaunted past. She wants to quiet all the reasons why she's the lesser, inferior version of herself, and knows he's crazy not to prefer that _her_ more, want _her_ more.

Oh god, her fucking bed. Her goddamn fucking bed.

Olivia throws back the comforter, strips the mattress of the sheets hissing with a love that wasn't hers.

She balls the bedding in her arms, nauseas from a lover's rendezvous, a vision scented with soap and sweat; the lie in her bed that holds the truth of his feelings.

She's become inadequate.

When she opens the wash, she sees the clothes in the top-loader, so she throws down the sheets before plucking out a sweater.

It's light brown, not black or white or gray, but mixed dyes of red and yellow, orange and white, colors worn by an undamaged her.

The taunting hoodie meets the hissing sheets before she pulls out a gray T-shirt. This one isn't hers. She doesn't recognize the feel, the wear.

_Oh god._

She turns it over, reads the insignia.

The acronym digs at her, the red letter's of Peter's alma-mater dripping with a poison that constricts her chest and chokes her breath.

This is his.

In her hands, caught by the fabric, dance the last traces of friction, atoms electrified by a shared, intense passion.

It's his body heat generated through another woman's touch.

She sees it, that _hers_ fingers, yanking at the threads and pulling it over his head.

_Oh god what if she'd worn it? What if she'd thrown on this fucking shirt because he'd surprised her with breakfast?_

And then Olivia feels anger again, grotesque and red before she throws down the tee.

They belonged to her, those moments but they'd been violently pillaged, stolen from her by the woman he'd loved in her bed.

A cold, dark hollowness has piggy-backed itself, latched on to her violence to eat away at the whole of her.

When it does, the tears come, they're hot and wet with empty resolve, and she feels herself falling, crumbling to the floor in a cowards defeat. She holds her face in her hands.

Salt water stings her skin, pinches it numb, and through the ache of all she's lost, she can be sure of one thing.

Hurt is a choking, vile offender, a goddamn fucking pair of gloved hands with a grip on her windpipe, effortlessly squeezing her into blackness before leaving her shaken and violently, hopelessly broken.

* * *

_She recalls her old car, a 1970s dodge she'd loved, worn to the ground until the body, the muffler, scraped against tar. She'd been attached, irrefutably connected to the blue and white scrap metal and when she had to buy new, she was skeptical, unsure she'd feel the same affection for any other car._

_She'd been wrong._

_So fast, so swiftly she grew fond of power windows, power locks, reclining seats and automatic transmission._

_It was a 2009 Dodge._

_Same model. Different, more glorious version than the original._

_To her surprise, she'd ended up loving it more._

* * *

That morning, she'd woke on the floor.

Her chest had still ached, eyes still burned, her skin, sticky from tears, had dried from exhaustion.

She'd felt pain's post-coital afterglow, an all over fatigue weighting her body and soul to her living room carpet.

She'd been anesthetized, wholly defeated, but when she finally got up, she'd black-bagged the fucking bedding.

And the sweater.

And for all intents and purposes, she should have thrown the T-shirt out to, so why she kept it, she doesn't know.

Maybe because it didn't belong to her.

Or maybe she remembered him wearing it, knocking on her hotel room door, speaking in octaves of discovered clues and unburied secrets. Still bound in its threads, hidden under _her_ ravaging, was his faint scent in a time when she'd loved him.

Maybe she still wanted some part of Peter, some rare, far away memory of when he could have had feelings for her too.

Or maybe, for some dark, sick reason, she wanted the pain of it reminding her that happiness is a short-lived hope, a feeling meant for the deserving, not the haunted.

Maybe she truly is too broken to fix.

* * *

When she got to work, she'd been late.

Astrid noticed because people do that; notice things, small things, big things, and unusual behaviors are to be questioned not ignored.

It's prerogative.

Olivia wondered how often he did that to_ that_ _her_, asked why she was smiling, or laughing, or wearing her emotions on the end of different sleeves.

Or had _she _made him too happy, so fucking satiated that he hadn't even cared?

Laundry, she'd explained to Astrid, she'd had to catch up and it's why she was late.

Not a full lie, not the whole truth.

After parking her car and stepping into the building, she vowed this morning to remain pragmatic and stoic, wouldn't let her system's shook up neurons effect her job.

But that self-promise broke when she'd asked the younger agent what Peter and her other had been like together, if he'd seemed better, happier with_ her._

Anxiety, the flighty, tiny butterflies under her flesh, urged she leave and walk away, tell Astrid to forget she'd ever asked but fate torments her.

_He thought she was you_, Astrid had said, and it was the same answer, the same goddamn cryptic, somehow meaningless thing Peter had said to her in that hospital cafeteria.

He'd had that rendition of her, held _her_, loved _her_, got _her_ morning smile and _her_ bedroom warmth, and all Olivia could do was remember that damn new car and its euphoric new car feel.

Those monarchs had stung, sliced her inside-out with sharp wings and she needed the pain, the subject, to drop.

Because as Astrid says more, she remembers discovering for the first time of a five star crash rating.

_What feelings Peter had, _the junior agent said, _were meant for you, they still are_.

At one time, maybe, she'd have believed that.

She'd loved something original for long enough, too.

Then something better came along.

* * *

She was short with him, that afternoon.

They'd been searching for clues, digging through case files to find an UNSUB, and though she knows he was trying, he didn't seem to be grasping the deduction or intuition of a profiler.

At first she'd told herself her impatience, her rising aggravation, stemmed from time lost to a fugitive killer's future victim, not Peter's fucking electric charge and it's static impregnation of every breath she took.

So of course, the rash pounding, the belabor in her chest wall had to know better.

He'd asked her why she was so quick to dismiss him, and she'd told him, curtly, that a profiler weighs the facts, feels the reasons, connections, in the pit of their stomach.

Then he'd asked, when she told him his descriptions weren't good enough, what it was she didn't feel.

A selfish need drove the man wild, a mad inner yearning to have again what he couldn't live without.

_He loved her,_ she'd told Peter simply, _a man who was fighting to give life to a girl who ended her own, loves her. Okay?_ she'd said, quickly, impatiently and that line, that beautiful godamn crease showed his irritation, his mild anger.

Electroception had been spliced, bound with the kind of thick tension discomfort is derived from.

She was angry at him, and he knew it.

She was mad because this was personal, to close to home, and she could no longer read him like a file to emote feelings in her gut.

She couldn't feel that he loved her, felt sorry for maybe, sympathized with, sure, but not that he still wanted her.

All she felt from him was erratic jumbled nerves in her.

He'd grown attached to that fucking new Dodge.

* * *

The air is cool outside, not too harsh or cold, but it still nips at her cheeks and seeps through her jacket.

Alone she sits, with her chin in her hands and her breath, stalled, not from the wind or fading adrenaline, but the icy crack of heartache.

_I don't know what I'd brought back,_ their UNSUB had said, when she'd held him at gunpoint on the floor, _but it wasn't Amanda. I looked into her eyes and I knew it wasn't her._

The words echo in Olivia's ears, a soundtrack damaging her resolve, happily chipping away at her wall till she feels it start to crumble in her fingers.

A soul is trapped in pupils, corneas, retina, an ocular window to the depth of who and how a person is.

For the past three years, his has been caught between hard decision and compassion, sacrifice and sympathy, humor and pain, and she knows this because she can read it in his eyes, feel it in the gray-green storm of his stare.

Even when she was over there, unsure of who and where she was, it had been his abysmal persuasion, his vision's profound immaterial essence that held her captive.

She'd been left to drown in a terrifying, confusing world, and finding the surface meant holding on to him and his illogical, irrational presence.

She'd trusted him, relied on him, even when he'd been lost to her, she loved him.

She doesn't want to,_ god, she doesn't fucking want to_, but she still feels it, that electro-communication, a stinging, burning impulse that shoots through air, and water and a parallel universe to spark in her chest and charge her fingertips.

He should have known _she_ wasn't her, been able to see past _her _smiles, wiles and fake fucking laughter. He should have looked into _her_ eyes and seen a stranger, felt the eerie reconditions of _her _differences.

Instead he'd been swayed by them.

She'd wanted to believe in a deep-seated, bone gnawing connection derived of mutual cognizance, an intimate, joint apprehension of another in every possible way.

_But fuck that._

Even when they're fantastical, she operates on facts, not eccentric notions of romance.

_Dammit, she knows better._

Twice now, she's fallen in love and twice now, she's been broken by it.

So fuck what the fairy-tale inspired eight year old inside her wanted to believe. There was no such thing as white knights and grand castles or happily ever after.

There was just cold, lonely, bone-chilling reality, so fuck the world. Fuck _her_ and _her_ cheer, and _her_ grimy thieving fingers.

And fuck him and his eyes, and that brow, and his damn suffocating kinetic energy.

She detests every impulse, every skin ripping impact he still has on her, so fuck her life, and this chair, and the gaping hole in her chest, too.

There are footprints, crunching through the frozen grass, and he calls out to her.

She closes her eyes, bites down on anger and metal and his goddamn gravity.

She wants him to go the fuck away.

Instead he reaches out, touches her shoulder and her muscles rebel, clench, burn under his hand.

"You okay?" he asks, and suddenly her jaw is pained from clenching, tightened by the rubber-banding of ire and emptiness squeezing her soul.

She doesn't want to do this now, doesn't want his presence, or concern or that goddamn smoked-honey voice near her, and she squeezes her eyes tighter, willing him to leave.

It doesn't work.

_He's not going to jump off a fucking cliff._

Instead he sits, and when he asks her what's wrong, that band snaps, spilling a sick infuriation, a bittersweet grief, out of her every pore.

_Fuck her fucking silence._

With the back of her hand, she wipes her mouth, wrestles back tears she doesn't want him to see.

And fuck her fucking fragility and the searing fucking heat running through her bones.

"You know what Barett said?" she asks, when she finally breaks the quiet, "He said that he looked into her eyes, and he knew that it wasn't her."

It's boiling her blood now, that heat, presses into her ribcage, when he swallows, and speaks her name in emerging defense.

He's going to try to explain himself, tune his excuses to sound sweet to her ears, but it doesn't matter.

No matter how much she'd adored it, that new car hadn't been worn down with use and affection, hadn't driven as comfortably or felt nearly as loved.

That new car wasn't her 1980s Dodge.

_And he should have known the fucking difference._

"You know, I understand the facts." she says to him when her chest, her skull, her limp arms, began to singe. "I know that she had reams of information about me, about my life, about the people that were close to me." Rage is paining her cranium, makes her fist her hands. "And I understand that if she slipped up, she'd have had a perfectly reasonable explanation for it."

He's aware now of her thoughts, perceptive of the beating she's going to put on him, so he sits back, patient and silent, bracing himself.

"And I guess, to expect you to see past that is perhaps asking a little bit too much. But when I was over there, I thought about you, and you were just a figment of my imagination."

A whisper of his vision's kiss, his calling back to remembrance of her washed-over brain, plays across her lips, tickles their flesh, and it infuriates her, enrages her.

"And I held on to you." She admits. "And it wasn't reasonable and it wasn't logical but I did it so...so why didn't you?"

Inadequacy, a consuming, enveloping loneliness, begins to mix with her anger, a dangerous cocktail concocted of hurt, defeat, and hopelessness.

There's silent embarrassment caught in his brow, a calm, hard shame that turns his eyes downward and she can feel it, his self deprecation, air thinned by his regret, thickened by her indifference.

She didn't care for his apology. She just wanted him to be pained from her hurt, crushed by her anger.

"She wasn't me." She says, her eyes wetting. "She wasn't me. How could you not see that?"

In the same devastating way as she, she wanted him to understand that his ignorance, his obliviousness of who she really is has a price.

It wasn't good enough that he'd simply been intoxicated, enthralled by _her_ thieving tendrils and menacing mouth.

He should have known from the feel of _her_, the scent, the touch and taste, that that woman was a lie.

A huge, devastating, crushing, painful fucking lie that's implanted_ her_ mark, and tainted a life.

So fuck_ her_ and _her _probing, robbing, life-sucking fingers, because _she's _sucked away what hadn't been hers.

And now _she _can have it.

And _she_ can have him too, because Olivia fucking hated him.

"She's everywhere." she tells him. "She's in my house, my job, my bed and I don't want to wear my clothes anymore and I don't want live in my apartment and I don't want to be with you."

It's asphyxiating now, the agony, the sheer devastation of hopelessness.

"She's taken everything." she finishes, and she wants to hit something, throw something, take out her gun and shoot him just so he can feel, and bleed, from the same pain, the same bullets, ripping through her body to disintegrate her soul.

Without another word, she gets up, unable to handle anymore the thick hovering of repercussion, and she doesn't care that she's left him suffocated by consequence or numbed by her anger.

She doesn't care that his apology trails her footsteps, follows her leave.

Nothing she knows is certain anymore and she just wants to get away.

She wants to forget that she breathes him, everywhere, constantly. She doesn't want to think, once upon a time, he may loved her too.

Because all of it, everything she thought was true, was a huge fucking lie.


	2. Chapter 2

That weekend, she'd eradicated every trace, every germy epithelial that other her left.

She'd wiped down her apartment, scrubbed it clean until satisfaction bled her knuckles raw. Nothing inanimate could perturb her anymore because last night, she'd slept on new sheets.

And she bought crisp suits and purchased fresh towels.

Even her toothbrush rose questions, so she has a new one of those too.

Now everything around her felt like pure cotton and smelled of new promise.

Except his shirt.

It still smelled of him.

It's hiding in her bureau, his grey M.I.T softness, stuck in the drawer to the left where she stores her photos and buries her knickknacks. If nothing else, her over there reminiscence owes his essence her freedom so in gratitude, she's keeping it.

To her reasoning, that sounds most logical, factual, because sooner or later, the persistent thump in her diaphragm has to stop.

Because it always does.

Because she thrives on impassivity.

At the end of her stepfather's knuckles, she'd thickened her skin. That bastard taught her, through blue and purple bruises, the emotional prime of insusceptibility.

And she was trying, _dammit, _she was trying to restructure what she'd learned.

Distance away from Peter should have, in a perfect world, urged her toward that steel and brimstone defense; her decades old impregnable fortress.

Instead, it's built a castle of sand; a fragile stronghold ready to crumble with any swift movement, and it wavered, faltered dangerously, when the book had come.

And it had enervated her.

_Because you'd asked_, the note inside said and he'd signed it, black letters that kicked at that granulated rock. She'd checked the order date, the packing slip and though she already knew, the novel wasn't meant for her.

At first she only eyes the hardback, feels the crushing weight of it under her stare and in the palm of her hands. Then she wonders in what quiet hour, what bedroom moment _that_ _hers_ curiosity drew this result.

Her fingers ache and head throbs in an immersion of discord that taps on her skull. She's been reminded harshly, unforgiving of the late night whispers robbed to her ears and she wants to throw the tome at that other _her's_ figment, hit and kill with the title's contempt.

Instead, she closes her eyes and feels the numb of carcinogen.

That her infuriates every time he undoes and it's an arsenic; a trioxide that's poisoned her veins.

And it's toxic to her mental complex.

So fuck them and their bane and her re-composition because her vitriol's more potent then venom.

She's driven, with granite determination to comprehend herself again.

It's her blood-lust for her once self, unassailable and steadfast, that's the antidote to their poison.

So she's giving the damn book back, she decides, as she tucks it in her jacket.

It's not for her, and he's not hers and she won't be this unnerved by an unwelcome never was.

She can't allow herself exposure.

* * *

They entrance her, the couple talking softly on the couch.

She'd caught sight of them when Broyles left, watched as the woman put her hand over the man's. Their faces are worn, creased, marked by age, but beautified with laughter.

They've shared time and it's clear to see.

Here on that sofa are two lives entwined, years spent dancing, in a selfless waltz of for better or worse till death do us part. Children and pets maybe filled those years, different schools, jobs and cities, too. Written in wrinkles, are decades of moments, days shared together in a lifetime of love.

When her mouth curves, Olivia's heart jerks, descends a tiny bit down her chest's depressed concave.

These two sit close, lean close, whisper and laugh close. They're sharing themselves completely, and Olivia knows, understands, how divided they'll be when the other is gone.

They'll hold on to this moment, these minutes, because that separation will leave them disheartened and scattered until the next nine allowable visiting hours.

It's not near enough time.

Behind her, she feels Peter approaching, a swift discompose of her protons that drives her neurons into mutiny.

She was resolute when she arrived here, vivified by her self-promised toughness. Broyles led her through the motions, introduced her to their case, and she ignored all the while, the singeing of her hipbone from the book in her side-pocket.

It was an uprising, a heated revolt against her body because everything he touches only wants him.

And fuck her bulletproof vest for its negating, because her on-edge atoms tell her that's true.

And insurmountability, that can fuck itself too now, because since she's been here, with him crowding her airspace, all it seems to be giving her is a head-numbing ache.

"That's sweet." he says, when he stands besides her and she looks again at the old couple, at the woman and her beaming, glowing smile.

She has her ever-after, that woman, because some 8-year old girls get back thier glass slipper and find their prince charming.

When you get the fairytale, once upon a time has a happy little ending.

"Yeah it is." She agrees, and her words fall flat to her ears.

If you get the nightmare, it just doesn't work the same way.

There's no room for white carriages on a path to dark places, and she was driving sightless on a twisting black road.

_So fuck happy endings too._

Searing now, is the heat in her pocket and when she pulls out the book, it doesn't cool in the air.

"I ah, I don't think this was for me." She tells him, suddenly feeling the weight of his presence. "I figured it was probably for her." she finishes, after explaining of the package slip and the order date.

"Look, Olivia-"

"It's okay." she assures, cutting him off.

She feels the slow approaching of a gigantic white elephant and it's quaking the floor beneath her feet.

This conversation requires too much attention, too many careful words, and this wasn't the time or place for his explanation and her apprehension of it.

Standing right here is awkward enough.

They're separated by inches, but she feels estranged somehow, distanced by ways he may have changed in eight weeks past.

Or maybe he hasn't.

If she can't predict herself anymore, maybe he can't gage who she's become.

It isn't her nescience she feels but every breath of his caution.

* * *

A week ago, when she left the hospital, all she wanted was to fit back in. To her world, her job and her own thick skin, she wanted to feel the familiarity of the belonging to her life.

It was a pipe-dream hinged at the base of her return.

She was good at puzzles and hints, finding connections where there are only empty clues, and she still bore that talent, felt its pretension.

It's the hairline fissures, the tiny personal breaks cracking through her investigatory skill, that are tearing her up.

It's difficult, to say the least, working with him again. She doesn't want to need his beautiful mind, instincts or patience for Walter, but their cases rely on all three.

So in the name of answers not found, she's dealing with her on-the-edge atoms. If the fucking white elephant would stop trailing her heels, pretending she was fine could be cake. It stops in, hovers, crowds every room Peter's sucked the air from already.

And right now, she wants to pull out her gun and shoot dead the hardly manageable tension.

They're in the lab's office, and he's just pulled the book, that goddamn fucking gift for _her_, from his bag.

Olivia's skin tightens when a stabbing in her gut twists, slices into her a side a little bit deeper.

_Oh god, they're going to talk about this now_, with Walter and Astrid outside and the weight of unsolved mystery in here, they're about to have this dreaded conversation.

She was tempted to run out the open door.

Her fingers twitch because he senses her panic and he throws a hand in the air, assuring friendly fire.

"I just want to try and explain the book." he says, carefully, methodically and she swallows.

"You don't have too." She responds quickly, and she crosses her arms, braces herself against her own discomfort.

She wants him to take this leave and bow out.

Her Advil's already reached its daily quota.

_God_, she hates feeling so demoralized.

"She asked me what my favorite book was." he says, and when he nears her, she clenches her teeth, gnashes her molars against her unwelcome vision and his disrupting aura.

This is so heavy a moment, it's weighted her eyes to the floor.

"I understand that she was probably just trying to gather information about me but...I also know that I'm not the easiest guy to get to know."

She feels his stare, grey blue that storms her capillaries, capsizes her hemocytes to crash against stones.

And she's swimming from the wreckage, submerged in a sad manifestation that's backstroking her blood.

From their first meeting, she knew personal detachment comes easy to him, thanks to a well armored infantry that keeps others at arm's length.

For years he's been charging at hers, and in eight weeks,_ that she's_ immobilized his.

Along with her life, _she_ sucked up his words, and _she_ stole his stories and cleaned out his mind.

_She_ could have learned him in many varied ways.

In ways Olivia still doesn't to this day.

"...which is actually something I think we have in common." he says, after he's spoken of those invisible defenses.

Slowly, she faces her grey tumult and her pulse quickens to a tachycardic rate.

His eyes have sped up her backstroke and it's too powerful, too asphyxiating so she looks back at nothing.

"The book wasn't meant for her." he tells her, with liquid words. "It was meant for the Olivia Dunham I've spent the last couple of years of my life with."

And that Olivia's nerves were at war, raging a civil conflict between injustice and anger and she puts her hand to her mouth, holding back the screaming-kicking chord of resentment.

None of this was fair, not his mislead initiatives or her spiraling discomfort.

"..I wanted you to read it." he says, setting the book on her desk. "You're the person I wanted to share it with."

It's injustice, a bittersweet grievance that's won the fight and Olivia swallows feeling divergent, intensely discomposed.

At this moment, she wants to hide within herself.

This is all uncustomary, his emotional exposure and her rapacious upheaval, and suddenly she feels divided.

Between who she was and how she is, what they were and how they are, she's been torn, miserably split between both longing and reality.

How it is, isn't how it should be because she can't even read the book's forward.

It's burning a hole through her desk instead, turning wood to ash while it singes her soul.

And she was painfully aware of the burn.

"You know I feel like Rip Van Winkle." she tells him, after gathering her thoughts. "Everything is different. Even you opening up to me is different."

Disparity softens her voice, drops her heart to the pit of her stomach and when his eyes fall, his empathy tempts to crossover.

But her chest, head, skin and bones, ache with a power that overwhelms her senses.

"This book is just a reminder of all the things that I missed." she admits. "Conversations we didn't have-"

Astrid interrupts, before Olivia can continue, and when the junior agent insists they see Walter, Olivia's relieved.

It's a struggle anymore, holding to herself.

Because _dammit, _he'd belonged to her once, in that world when she pulled him back with her conviction and kiss, he'd been purely, solely hers.

And it'd made her break her promise when her thoughts spilled out as words.

She can't hold to herself, because every part of her was still holding on to everything about him.

And she doesn't want to admit that she can't let go.

Because no matter how small now, she still had love for that old, beat-up car.

* * *

_In her dream, Peter never came back._

_Instead he'd stayed to live in their world, to experience things new and strange because he still bore the weight of his oldest scar, a kidnapped child who wanted, needed, to get home and belong._

_He'd said he'd had no future, over there in her world, in that place not meant for him, but she'd begged with him, pleaded that he take her hand and follow her back. Even in sleep, he'd beat under her ribs, and his resistance was cooling her blood, splitting her neurons._

_Where I am, you have to be, she'd told him, desperate, I need you, you were meant for my world, because everywhere, all the time, I can feel you. You belong with me._

_I don't Olivia, he'd said, backing away, chilling the air that had heated her persistence. Nothing over there can be real to me, not the job, or lab, or Walter. There's no truth in a world where I'm a lie._

_Then his face grew dark, pained, and he reached out, touched her cheek, frictioned her skin with the stroke of his thumb. In his eyes agony twisted conviction, a grey-green fight that made her shake with discordance. _

_I don't belong with you, he'd said, because you're not my reality._

_His words had been soft, hushed, and then he was gone, lost to her dream in the whisper of heartache._

_In her sleep, he didn't come home._

_Because he never loved her._

* * *

They're headed to FBI headquarters, when her mind's eye brings alive what her dream-state had buried.

Hovering between traffic lights and consciousness, it flashes, so quick and steady it stalls her breath.

_You're not my reality, _the words are a whisper, a soft sound of what could have been, and she tightens her grip on the wheel.

_I don't belong with you, Olivia, go home._

And instantly, after she turns the car, she's back in that world and she's breaking.

He's walking away, and there's nothing she can do about his decision or her leaded body.

He's let her go, in a swift tearing away of her every molecule and it's a painfully slow killing, putting to death her life and all hope.

And there's a dashboard in her vision now, and street signs and yellow lines and his shuffling of files and the car's rhythmical hum.

He's saying something now, but she can't hear.

Her senses are too enveloped, too acutely aware of only his magnetism, his electrons because he's all too real, and he's stunning, and he's here because he chose to come back.

She hears the blinker now.

He'd come home.

She feels the pedal under her foot.

And he'd stayed.

It's on contrition now, that she swallows.

More so then the betrayal or anger, she feels the wrath of her mistreatment, her brash, unstated unfairness toward him, and her self-reproach nauseates while attacking her apathy.

Since the cafeteria, since his words and her unforgiving madness, she'd been selfish, trapped by the pity she's been spitting in his soul.

And maybe it wasn't fair.

So maybe she'll attempt to see past the blinding red of her reactive emotions, and try, at least try, to take stock in the moving, breathing, reality sitting next to her.

She'll be okay with him because she trusts in fact, and the beautiful, astonishing, actuality speaks for itself.

Peter was here, in this car, with her, and there's a sweet meaning in real truth because right now, it fills the air and it sparks her atmosphere.

He came back, and he stayed, and that has to be good enough.

Because it's all the looking-past she can muster right now.

He says her name, and when he touches her arm, she blinks away her cogitation.

"Hey." he says, "You okay?"

That beautiful, brow-bending muscle, holds the same concern and worry of the morning she got back, and she nods, embarrassed.

"Yeah, no, I was ah..."

There wasn't a lie she could think of telling, so she simply tells him she's fine.

But to her dismay, his beautiful mind was perceptive and un-foolable, with an undeniable power to see through her mastered talent of masking all-rightness.

So as she always does, she ignores her agitation when he nods and sits back, in his calm acceptance of her rogue personality.

He's like this with her, patient, unquestioning and it's now, in her retrospective all-overness, she's keenly mindful how much space, time and quiet endurance he's always shown her. He's never tried to strip her mind naked or peel her thoughts raw.

That he does unconsciously, without effort.

He's terribly sweet toward her aversion to personal exposure, and right now, it was ruthlessly adding to her sense of shame.

So fuck whatever life she has now because she shouldn't have been so hard on him.

She moves her hands down the wheel as her lips form around some kind of apology, some kind of decent explanation of her recent reactions she can give to better-off her guilt complex.

Then his phone rings.

And she doesn't get the chance.

* * *

The times she's almost lost him remain countless.

He's been victim to a contagion and a teenager, a mind probe, a gun barrel, his own reluctance and the truth of where he's from. At first in those hours, adrenaline infused her. She'd been impassioned by determination and her need to save him. It was in the quiet hours, those bathroom-stall stealing chances, when devastation came to threaten her with fear.

And dealing with it meant busier work or hiding, alone, in a dark hallway's silent shadows.

Today, instantaneously, unexpectedly, another tally mark was added to her heartbreak's countless sum.

Six hours ago, they'd come back from Boston. Not surprisingly, they were again left asking questions after Peter had been stunned by a pulse, an electro-magnetic bullet trigged by a vanished Observer.

That time, he'd walked away, he'd been bruised and curious but a domino had tipped, effecting a line of events that led again to his life's threat and her sweaty, racing pulse.

It happened when they returned to the lab.

"Peter," she'd said to him, after he'd grabbed his head, "Are you sure you don't want to see a doctor?"

Dismissing her concern, he'd put his hand up, said he'd be okay as he un-pocketed his Advil and reached into the fridge.

So she'd dropped her worry.

There's a time of the day when silent accomplishment fills the air, a light and momentary case-ending ease, that for one night or even just a few hours, makes Olivia feel valuable.

That time of day was then.

Until she spied the book.

It was in his bag, peeking out and she'd touched it, slowly, anticipating the bite but it didn't hold fire anymore, only ash.

She'd burned through its hatred in the car, when she'd felt his real, came back for her heat. Nothing could be hotter then the fact of his being here in this world with her now.

But questions of _her_ and them still rose in the smoke, and as she'd turned the book over, it'd begun to weigh down her hands.

It felt like an instant black hole then, a vortex draining the energy from her fingertips and toes, and she was left fatigued, saddened not angry, by all the things they'd shared in quiet.

Like the book, and his couch and her bed.

And it had hit her, hard, all the things she really didn't know of him. To a T, she understood the deeper parts of him, the who, how, and why, but it's the simple things, like his favorite movie or band she's clueless of.

If she'd felt emasculated before, she'd felt absolutely deplorable then.

That_ her _may have been gathering information, analyzing _her_ mission, but the taunting fact remained.

_She _probably knew the names of his childhood friends and his favorite elementary memory.

And Olivia can't even recall his favorite color.

He'd spoken to her then, before he'd turned from the icebox, saying something of questions and answers, but she didn't hear, only stared, hard, at the book's cover.

She'd been tempted to open it, read the preface, but turning a page would only unleash her reality's fleeting emotion.

The book had been meant for her.

He'd shared some part of his life with who he thought she was because he'd wanted her to piece every part of him together. He wanted her to know him completely.

Maybe it was about time she tried.

If only to make her feel, in the least, good enough to love him.

He called out her name then, and it tears her eyes from the black and white cover.

He'd been curious of her pondering, his questioning eyes had told her so, and so she'd smiled at him, in assurance that her thoughts hadn't been to deep or heart-pounding to escape from.

Even when the book had felt ten times heavier then it should have.

"So why is this your favorite book?" she'd asked and waved it slightly as she'd neared him.

"Because it talks about not depending on other people for answers. That you can only find the answers inside yourself. Which-" he popped the pills in his mouth. "-given our current situation is kind of amusing if you think about it."

She'd looked down then, entrapped by his words. Funny thing it really is, being a paradox unto yourself, trying to live up to the strong and certain version of who you'd been by elongating a smile or wearing more eyeliner.

That her had had motives, a mission, a destination and an end.

And the beginning of truths was dealing better and more confidently, in her aftermath.

Olivia couldn't find answers in science and patterns if she was constantly questioning the holes in herself.

That meant she had to search through scar tissue, her insusceptibility, the deep connections in her nerve fiber's resilience to find the secrets that her left behind.

No one teaches you how to gain independence through self-defenses.

Intimately and honestly, they both know that's a lesson learned through oneself.

She'd been struck then, pained by her own truth and she couldn't have anticipated the breath-staking anxiety he'd then bury in her flesh.

The collapse had been quick and sudden, frightening, accentuated by the broken glass of the milk jug that had slipped from his hands.

She'd called his name then, shouted it, as though her voice could have ceased his body's raging tremors.

And it's a blur of racing time, what had happened next, sped by her reactive panic and thready, racing heartbeat.

She'd called Walter, she remembers, after she'd run to Peter, threw herself to the ground and met his seizing form and her fallen chest.

_The milk_, Walter had said, something had been wrong with it, reactive inside it, and over the phone he'd guided her, directed her as she'd pleaded he concentrate because she had to help Peter.

She'd had to save him.

Because_, _dammit her body had run cold, drained of the life-blood that convulsed before her.

Violent determination aided her then, to the phosphates and the syringe and under her shaking, frantic digits, its needle had met his flesh.

He'd stopped seizing then, after she'd hollowed the barrel, compressed the anti-coagulant into his veins while fear swam through her own.

And it had worked.

She'd heard Walter's voice on the phone, as frenzied as her nerves, and when he'd asked of his son, she'd told him he'd stabilized.

Breath came then, back to her lungs, matching the tempo of the chest under her palm.

God, she remembers the relief, inhalations of his still-here air that supplanted her fear when he'd groaned and twisted under her hands.

Then she recalls his heat, like a phoenix, an instant rising of fire that had scorched through her cells to reawaken her blood.

And then that beautiful muscle creased, in retract of pain and confusion, and she'd traced his brow smooth with her thumb.

She'd said his name, softly, gently, and he'd blinked open his eyes before his lips curved in a slow, small awareness of who'd been above him.

It had been sudden and overwhelming, the urge to have kissed him, but underneath her relief, that scar tissue itched.

So she'd only smiled back instead.

He'd grabbed his head then, moaned again, and when he'd rose on his elbows he'd taken in the broken glass, and empty syringe. She'd remembered his eyes, a gray perplexion turned conscious before he'd set his brow and turned back to her.

Then his mouth curved again.

"I've never told you, but I'm lactose intolerant."

She'd laughed then, in relief, overcome simply by the beautiful way that he was. Even near death, his sense of humor won out.

"Makeshift Epipen?" he'd asked, as he'd held up the syringe.

"Yeah." she'd answered, before he'd thrown it down and nodded his head. "I called Walter. It was the best we could do."

His smile had grown tooth-full, and when his eyes had bore into her, she'd felt the scourging in her fingertips.

"Thanks for saving my life."

Deep in her bones had been the weight of his gratitude and she'd dug her knees in the floor to brace her light-headedness.

"Thanks for coming back."

Her words had been quiet, severely honest, and when he'd rose a brow, he 'd silently understood.

It hadn't been that day or moment she'd spoke of.

She'd ushered him back to three months past, and when he'd nodded, slowly, she'd looked down before he'd spoke.

"I'll always come back."

The words were quiet, almost a hoarse whisper and she feels their plea in her chest.

_For you, Olivia_, he'd really said,_ I came back not for her, but to you because it's where I want to belong._

Then that scar tissue tightened, squeezed, begged her to weigh the what-had- happened facts.

And the discomfort suppressed her.

But so did the feel good-side of his words.

Pressing silence had filled the air then, and she'd felt her cheeks redden on her own fragility.

Then she'd heard him pluck a piece of glass and her eyes met it's gleam.

"How can I miss out on all this?"

And when his wit had cut the room again, she'd laughed before helping him to his feet.

He'd pressed into her then, while gaining his balance, and more then the book, he'd burned through her side.

When he squinted, he'd grabbed his head and she'd asked again if he needed a doctor. Once more, he'd brushed it off.

Then his smile drew lines at the corner of his eyes.

"What's another day at the friendly neighborhood lab?"

When those lines stretched, her smile had met his.

"C'mon," She'd said then, yanking gently, on his coats sleeve. "Walter will want to check you out, make sure you're okay. I'll take you home."

And she'd had.

* * *

Now she was sitting in her car, parked between his side-street and her up-in-arms mind.

In the window she sees shadows, silhouettes of Peter and Walter in front of a lamp's dim glow, and it's the surrounding darkness that's her indecision's safe-haven.

Countless times, she's almost lost him.

And this time, she'd felt regret and desperation chocking her soul.

Strange how introspective you become when what you love has been threatened. All the thoughts you've had over are like rain drops in a pothole, spilling over in a puddle to flood your cerebrum.

Everything that might matter seems definite somehow, because all the small wonders have grown ten times thier size.

So she was toying with an idea of her apology, wondering if she should step out of this cabin and knock on the door.

Simply, easily, she could tell him she'd been unfair, harsh even, since she'd learned of his truth with _that her_, and though she stands between acceptance and insufficiency, he didn't deserve her verbal backhand or cold shoulder.

Especially not when, even now, her skin still burns from it's resurrected fire.

She knows, in the least, she should try and smooth down the rough edges between them, iron the wrinkles of tense uncomfortably by telling him she'll look past her lingering anger and just accept inadequacy.

Because in spite of the feel good wanting side of her brain, she still felt incomparable to _that_ _her_.

The facts are _she's _better, funnier and less complicated, and so had been Peter when he was with _her_, so in the end that drove Olivia's self-reproach mad.

He'd learned her by her unassailability, and though recently delicate, she questions if insuperability is her lonely, empty fate.

It's a tragic thought, a horrific inquisition, that because she's incapable of happiness she can't be his.

And after today, after those painstaking minutes of his near-death threat and her restrained lungs, her heart-rending conceptions seemed five times more real.

It's why she's decided to drive away and forget why she's been sitting here since she brought him home.

Her certitude in life was in danger and death, and now, he was safe and alive.

For right now, she'll let that be enough.

Even though, when she pulls the gearshift and turns the wheel, her fingerprints burn, instant and hotly, through the leather.


	3. Chapter 3

The day after he'd left, she was given the drawing.

It was a delineation of Peter, a terrifying depiction of him caught in a machine, trapped in a horror of archaic-mechanics and implied fate.

She'd been sitting at a barstool, distracting her pity, when she'd spotted the Observer's back. Swiftly, silently he'd left the paper beside her and when she'd picked it up, she'd scanned the crisp white of a nightmare.

She'd given it to Peter, over there, after he'd examined diagrams of that alter-Walter's machine. It responds to him, he'd realized, when the power cell had charged under his hand.

It's a doomsday device, the Wave-sync, an ancient terror of engineered metal that harbors Armageddon flames.

And Peter's caught in its fire, burned by whatever ignition that drawing's showing he started.

He's not going to let it happen, he'd stated, he won't destroy a universe to rescue another.

_I have to believe there's another way, _he'd said to her over there as he'd shuffled the illustrations, _I have to believe there's a way to save both worlds._

_Then we share the same hope, _she'd told him, _we'll find a way. We have too._

And it's why, over here, they've unburied the machine, tracked down its mammoth pieces from every end of the globe. Massive Dynamic has reconstructed it, connected steel and joints and wires to reveal an omen of disaster through a structure of wonder.

As she stands here now, in this shuffling hanger, she feels its radiation; a foreboding, airborne contagion that poisons her breath.

"It's bigger than I'd imagined." she comments to Nina, Broyles and her team.

"I suppose." Peter responds, "It's just big enough to destroy two universes."

And then a freight train hits her, a fast railroading of unimaginable proportion that makes her head spin.

For months now, he's been at the center of this, not just the rebuilding, but his own horrid implications of a pre-determined destiny.

There's a special place reserved in nightmares for uncertain fears, a dark, subconscious corner holding the bleakness of future what-could-be's. When dread overthrows, all that fear rests snuggly, infinitely, in a bed of stolen fate.

And it's that bleak, locomotive hit that has her questioning if he visits there often, to the cold room of his recess mind where apprehension lays bare, sprawling ugly and naked on that same bed of what-if's.

She tries to shake it off though, ignore the answer, because they're all talking, saying the machine doesn't work because the power source is gone. _She_ took it, that fake her, for reasons they don't know until they've sorted through _her_ data.

Suddenly there's a loud clanging in the lab, a harsh rapping of metal against steel, and she looks behind her.

It's moving, the machine, in an instant wakening that's disrupted the computers and set off mass panic.

It's stunned Olivia, amazed her, not because of its grandeur or scale, but its horrible, come-to-life monstrosity.

Before their eyes, it's groaned awake and it's terror seems eighty times more real then when it didn't move at all.

Behind her, Walter gasps, in the words of "_Good god_" before Dr. Falcon remarks that it's been triggered somehow.

"Something did trigger it." Peter says, and Olivia turns on his matter-of-fact tone. "Me."

And then he holds up his finger.

She sees the red of blood glistening, slowly drying on his fingertip and as Nina sucks a breath, she feels depleted of her own.

Blood has never made her queasy, but right now she feels sick, nauseas, kicked by the come-to-life reality of what all this really means.

This mechanical monster could mean his death.

And when she starts to feel dizzy and unbalanced, she has a sure idea why.

This machine is gripping his matter, and what's been entangled in his senses is breaking her down with him.

* * *

At eleven thirty-seven, she'd called him.

She'd toyed with her phone, tossed it in her hands, wrestled with the concept of dialing before she'd punched his number in the keypad.

As it rang, she'd held her breath, felt her throat burn with saliva and swallowed something like nerves.

He'd been shaken earlier, not surprisingly, after they'd left the hanger, but he by-passed the machine's representation with humor. As always, he'd filled the rest of the day with light sarcasm and despite his resistance, agreed to an M.R.I in the morning.

In six hours, they're to find out what physical side effects that fucking world's end beacon harbors.

On the other end of the phone, she gets his voicemail and closes her eyes. His non-answer could be her way out, her escape from a conversation balancing her apologies with empathy and she can't say she isn't, if slightly, relieved.

And then she considers reason two for his phone's empty line.

Fear begins to envelope her now, creepy-crawling from her toes to her fingertips and it pools in her chest; an incarnation of panic.

_Oh god, what if something's happened to him?_

What if the extreme effects were postponed, delayed, waiting till these quiet hours to strike him with unconsciousness or some other malady?

Olivia envisions it again, his seizure in the lab, his body contorted and twisted in painful convulsion, and that panic rises to a level that forces goose-bumps on her flesh.

She tries to think of Walter's number, of Astrid's, then remembers her cell-phone and it's speed-dial contacts.

She races to her jacket, pulls the phone from it's right-pocket before pressing number four.

Pressure swims in her veins now, in her head and ears, as her ribs struggle to hold her hardening lungs.

"Hello?" The voice is clear, precise, sweet-like even and Olivia exhales to control her panic.

"Astrid, it's me. Have you talked to Peter lately?" Her words are hurried, and she swears, under her breath.

I saw him not ten minutes ago, she's just told her, before she speaks of just leaving Walter and their three rounds of Monopoly.

"Why Olivia?" she questions, "Is everything okay?"

Chasing Astrid's words, is her instantaneous relief and it quickly lessons her body's frozen trauma.

"Yeah, no, I uh-." She tries to think of something valid, something passable, but nothing comes. "It's-it's nothing. Have a goodnight Astrid."

After the agent wishes her the same, she flips closed her phone.

Then in a heap of all-consuming exhaustion, she falls to her couch.

This is getting ridiculous, this constant back and forth of both her apprehension and want for him.

She dry washes her face, runs a hand through her hair and allows herself a slice of the truth she can't erase.

No matter what confusion or upheaval stalk her at night, Olivia can't look past what he still is to her.

The brilliantly infinite cornerstone of her fucked up, rocky foundation.

And under her skin, that scar of independence constricts.

* * *

The observance room is white, still, bathed in bright lights and tense trepidation. There's a large pane, on the wall-to-wall window, and she leans against it as the M.R.I cocoons him.

_I went for a walk last night, _Peter told her, when getting prepped for the test, that's why he didn't pick up his phone.

She'd shook her head and patted his hand, pretended his skin hadn't melted her palm. If he'd needed her, she'd be outside, she'd said this to him though she knew him much better.

He'd shown no fear, no hesitation, as wires were placed on his skin, instead humor had lightened his brow.

It eats her up inside, his cool handling of that Wave-sync's threat.

She envies his ability to be so collected, to seem so un-phased. If it were her on the other side of this window, anxiety would shade all the planes of her face.

And it's only making her astonishment, her adoration of his soul's core glory beat even hotter under her flesh.

Behind her, Walter's arguing, his voice raised at Doctor Falcon in protest of the test. Peter's heart rate is high, narrowly taccicardic, and his father fears it's going to quicken. _It's hardly life threatening_, the practitioner says, but Olivia's own pulse starts to beat heavy.

"Okay, so what is going on?" she questions, and Falcon tells her what she's already deduced. Peters blood pressure is elevated. It should have stabilized by now.

"Do you think his heart rate could have triggered the machine?" She asks, already knowing the answer.

It was stable when he was in that hanger, because it was beating on the base of her neck.

Falcon ratifies her but says it's a curious finding, they should run more tests and she needs certainty, of her life-blood's resiliency , so she doesn't argue.

Beside her, Walter stiffens and objects. "By all means, let's use my son as the Massive Dynamic lab rat-"

"Walter, I don't think the doctor was sug-" before she can continue, her phone rings and she answers.

It's Broyles and there's another dead shape-shifter. She's needed at the Port Authority.

She tells Walter to call her, if the tests reveal anything else and as she walks away, she hugs her collar to the cooling skin of her neck.

* * *

They've printed out the encrypted data from_ that_ _her's _computer.

It's separated categorically, in piles of names, places and objects, wet nouns of ink drying on the tabletop's surface.

Spread out here is a wealth of organized information, a paper-well of words forming that _hers_ intentions.

But they don't want Olivia to sift through it, to read it, and it makes her question the teamed opposition.

Broyles and Astrid exchange a glance, and their silent, shared knowledge doesn't go unnoticed.

"Because she wrote about me."

Peter's voice is stern, huskily soft, and it's drained Olivia's veins of red cells.

She grips the table but feels cotton sheets, the one's she'd yanked off her bed to rid her room of the filth.

But it's rode on her heels and followed her here.

On this table, tainting these pages, is the dirt she'd left bagged on her apartment's street-corner.

You can't truly leave behind, what you refuse to look past.

That truth is a head-on collision that's rammed into her now. And she closes her eyes from the bone-breaking back-lash.

"Yeah." Broyles responds. "There's parts of this that read like a diary. You're quite prominent."

A vicious agitation, the kind borne of inner turmoil rebounds Peter's blood, a plyometric launching of embarrassment that latches onto the bottom of her spine.

They don't want her to read it in fear of her hurt.

Protect the protector, that's the order here, and she tastes, in the back of her mouth, the metallic tinge of irony.

"We better get to Massive Dynamic." He says, dismissal punctuating the end of said sentence.

Olivia tells Astrid to keep her updated before she follows him out the door, and as she walks behind him, his pace quick and direct, his crimson-colored fury seeps into her every single vertebrae.

* * *

_A year and a half ago, she'd first seen him glimmer._

_She'd believed, until that night mostly evil colored 'over there', swiftly moving in shadows of electric monsters and biological freight-fests. She'd thought that world to hold only quiet darkness. The one that encroached on our side to fight for our light._

_When she'd stood on his threshold and saw the sheen of his energy, his reality in this world turned her morale on its head._

_He was eerily captivating, frightfully luminescent, a stunning origin discovered on the heels of her 'sees things from that side' ability. Nothing over there anymore, could be only vile and nefarious, because even then, her night terrors cowered at Peter's striking soul._

_What she'd believed in, what she thought real, lost it's credibility that night when his truth spun her world's axis._

_For days following, she'd kept her distance, from him and Walter, mistaking easier with it's opposite, and in the bottom of tumblers some kind of immaterializing, un-corporeal version of him would appear._

_Empty whisky bottles failed to fill her, though it hadn't been the brazen liquid that had twisted her stomach._

_She'd contemplated telling him the truth, bit down on the idea of it,but cost and worth were two different things._

_Peter had asked her, days later, after she'd called him for help, why she hadn't phoned Broyles._

_From across the room, he'd stared her down, curious, maybe grateful, and that goddamn blue-green fire had turned her ligaments structure-less._

_In those minutes, she'd felt the inaugural surge of his blood, a metastasizing surrender of her owns' parent muscle._

_His name, that day, had endangered her heart for the first time._

_And in that moment, she knew her own cost was his infallible worth._

_It had been a selfish, unfair decision, but she'd chosen silence in return for his air._

_He'd caught her up in hot quarks, angry nuclei that had danced on the skin of her arms, the tip of her tongue. In the least, standing there, she'd wanted to say what he's come to mean to her, but she'd known herself on that night, and wouldn't take such a risk._

_So she'd blockaded him out, and simply thanked him instead._

_A year and a half ago, real became her helpless rendering to relentless synchronism, to connectedness, a level of interrelation shared with no-one before him._

_They were no longer merely alive, standing together as colleagues, but they coexisted, collided on the invisible planes of every universe._

_Real became an extrasensory perception of someone else's core context._

_Though it's anatomically impossible, scientifically absurd, a year and half ago his heartbeat integrated her own._

_And to this day, it's the most certifiable truth she's ever known._

* * *

They would have been alone in the white room if not for the rift between them, the invisible tear of things unsaid and un-faced; the lining of their would-be companionable conversations cut to short replies and curt acquiescence.

If Olivia were to reach out her fingers, it wouldn't be mere space between her and Peter. She was knocking elbows again with that goddamn white elephant.

It's become the third wheel of their company and she considers, bitterly, if she should give it government clearance.

Beside her, Peter's arms are tight to his sternum, in defense of the same intruder that still painfully nudges into the deep of her back.

And it's making her divergent to tell him she'd rather be at the lab.

Standing around has never been her strong-suit, so being here in a stalemate, watching facial stress technology screen for suspects, is testing her impatience.

There's clues, answers, laying in stacks in front of Astrid, and Olivia's unrepressed if eager to know the words typed into the consensus of her other's time here.

She'd think twice, maybe, if that virtual journal could enlarge her chest's hole.

It's only to feed her curious bitter disparity now, her anger's aftertaste, that she wants to know what lover's whispers her ears never heard.

Pain's climax has already numbed her heartache; three times over.

So she's merely a spectator now.

"Peter," she says to him, breaking the quiet, "about the other Olivia's files, I know you're trying to protect me, but reading about it isn't going to make it worse."

He tries to interject, but she cuts him off.

"Peter, I'm not doing any good here. But if I can help Astrid with the files-"

"Olivia." Granite, flanked by tenderness, stops her persuading, invades her self-sense.

His glabellas muscle is deep, beautiful, softly tight and she's narrowed down her tense shoulders to his looming power.

"I've conned people." He tells her. "And I know what I would have written about that."

His vision glues her soles to tile floor and he swallows, hard.

"She must have thought I was a fool."

As it had before, her back clenches, a forcible ache of his self-loathing, a taking over of her skin with gloom echoes of his chakra.

That other her has raped him too, from the inside out, and she sucks his vulnerability into her lungs.

Just as she, he'd been _her_ victim, and she's suddenly repulsed by her own blinding selfishness. All this time, these past three weeks, he's been pounding his head on regret's thick door.

But her ignorance has deafened the knocks of empathy he's earned.

And her next breath stings.

Turning away now, is their third guest, their mammoth ton of debilitation.

It's uninterested in the ionosphere of said things.

Peter drops his head and she reprimands her own shame.

"And I don't want you to see me that way."

These words are softer then the former, almost cracking, and they succeed in breaking her resilience.

He fears she'll comprehend him a lesser man, an insult to dignity, but he doesn't understand she hasn't the ability.

Because in one sentence, he's torn apart her self-inflicted defense, undone her fibroblasts of scar tissue and ripped away her independence.

Again.

And again, where she stands, his bewildering beauty has taken her over.

Brandon reports, through the overhead speakers, that they're done, the tests are over and as the moment breaks, between his burrowing vision and her stagnant lungs, she's left standing in his fog from that her's smoke and mirrors.

_That_ _hers_ journal gave a voice to the ghosts that stole a life, a soft whisper of a psyche too familiar for comfort.

Caught in the neatly typed sentences had been echoes of Olivia's own chest, an issuing of her own sentiments in her own language, inked together to define a hold without the limit of one world.

His attraction disarms the her of now and then.

And the other played it to the beat of his mental berating.

It had taken his turning back and her gathered courage to send permanently home their 900 pound white intruder.

* * *

After the lab they'd found themselves in their latest victims home, surveying and collecting, before the unassuming foyer cradled her apology.

Time and place had come second to the need for clear air, an internal, all around dual vaporizing of _that_ _her's_ carbon monoxide.

So she'd filtered the fume by admitting her selfishness, her blind, narrow-sidedness of who and what_ that_ _her_ affected.

He'd been just as used and violated, peppered with a hundred unwelcome adjectives that elicited contempt, and he deserved to know that she finally understood it.

Because his quiet sorrow, his self-deemed unforgivable sins cried at her feet.

So what absolution she could grant, she'd had. If only to acquiesce his repentance and lay-down her own.

"She's gone now." she'd said to him. "I know it doesn't feel like it but, she is gone. And we can move past this."

* * *

_They were on their way to Boston, in the memory, her broken hip and senses forced her invalid, so he was driving._

_He was messing with the radio, speaking of some younger experience of a different existence, but she'd heard only static, the speedy incoherent sound of her accident's fizzling after-shock._

_She'd been released from the hospital five hours ago, and if not for her shaking wrists, her unstable perceptions, she could pull off the guise of being fine._

_Except for him. He'd known, despite how she'd wanted it, he'd known better._

_They'd been and still are, after all, unexplainably compelled to perceive each other._

_And she'd be angry of his knowing her, if the injured, innocent scared child inside her hadn't clawed at his shoulders for comfort and trust._

_Indulgences he freely offered._

_She'd heard him laugh lightly, and when she'd turned a questioning brow, lines form the corner of his eye._

_"What?" She'd asked, and he'd shook his head, hugged the wheel in his palms._

_"What normal is to us, I think this is it." he explains. "Driving to the ends of the earth to discover the latest extraordinarily, grueling mystery that threatens humanity." he ducks his head, reading the street sign and before he continued, he turned the car._

_"Not to mention our sanity."_

_She'd smirked and he'd chuckled._

_God, on that day, she'd loved his laugh, soft and rolling from the place where amusement met boyhood innocence._

_A complete contrast to the demons he wore on his brow._

_"What's sanity?" she'd responded, her grin growing._

_They'd drive a few more miles before he spoke again._

_"As strange as it sounds, I would have missed this."_

_I would've missed you, he'd really said, she'd felt it in her jumbled senses, read it through the white knuckles of his hand._

_He'd meant it so strongly, he'd stressed every muscle in his body taunt._

_This had broken through her mind's static fizzle, the first, small hint of their magnetic synchrony._

_There'd been a tenderness in the air then, a thickening of mutual compassion derived from his words and her examination of them._

_So she'd reached out her hand to brush his arm._

_"As strange as it sounds, I would have too."_

_Under her scratched, bruised fingers, she feels his forearm tighten._

_"If you hadn't-" he begins, but swallows the words, catches his vulnerability._

_"I'm glad you're back, Olivia."_

_She'd squeezed his forearm, a hugging of appreciation hinting at need._

_"So am I."_

* * *

He's standing in front of her and inside, she's breaking down.

She's just told him he he'd had nothing to worry about, that the words, inked in that journal, burned into her corneas, carried nothing but the valiance pertained to his beauty.

He's smiling at her but tension grips menacingly on the muscle of her ears, so even the words she'd told him in that busy corridor felt air light now.

It's because she's wondering, with a brash, betraying drop of her lungs, if _she'd_ stood here like this, looking at him, two inches from the threshold and seven from his mouth.

_God,_ she was tempted to close the gap, squelch the differences from _that_ _her _she'd swore to own. Her tongue burned to taste again his lips, his breath, the honey flavored wonder at the corner of his smile.

And suddenly, her shoulders are heavy, her chest thick with shame, and his hands, once to his sides, now find his pockets.

Again, he was crossing over and into her, seeping through her skin like water into fibers.

That painfully beautiful line creases deep in his forehead, raises his brow, turns his eyes sad and regretful, with the hint of a memory.

Here, in this entranceway he'd led _that her_ upstairs.

Olivia feels this truth beating in the center of her back, her wrists.

So she bites her cold lips and turns the door's knob, carries the rush of night air into the heavy hallway.

Without a word she steps outside, begins to climb down the stairs when he calls her name. She presses tight her eyes, and fists her hands in her pockets, wills him to go back in and shut the door.

She wants to be the only one party to her own disparity.

But she turns around feeling, knowing, it's a misery shared.

Under the porch lights his face is soft, pained, his chin, slightly set with words that won't come out.

_I'm sorry, _isn't good enough, and _it was supposed to be you, _no longer holds water.

So in response to his silence, she drops her head, feels the cool of the night against the blur in her eyes. Her lips press into a line as she raises a sad brow.

Tonight, this is what it is. They are what this has made them.

Two ghosts in a mirror; fractured by three.

He feels it, as strongly as she, and the whisper of_ that_ _her's_ presence carries on the breeze through her hair.

This makes her breath hitch, his body stiffen, and so before she falls apart, cranium to toes, she shrugs her shoulders, urging him to not speak.

_Not tonight_, her eyes tell him, _I can't hear this right now._

So he's defeated, and presses his forehead to the arm he's braced against the doorframe.

In the same sadness as she, she feels his soul choke, and its raising the small hairs on the back of her neck.

Undone and broken, she turns from him, and makes her way to her car amidst the stifling silence.


	4. Chapter 4

Self-pity has made her its concubine.

Its raping echoes in Olivia's words, a violent degrading of self-character; a bitter comparison of her locum-tenus.

"She's like me, but better." She tells Nina, and the thought tears at her diaphragm, like nails digging in her ribcage to scratch at her lungs.

That other her, she laughs, has friends, and a mother and her closet hangs a wardrobe that accentuates heels.

It's no surprise now, if Peter feels for her other what Olivia envies herself. _That_ _her_ isn't broken, or too guarded, worn from years of running toward fears in the dark.

Desire is a newer, better model, and trade-in has no value when worth has already bled out.

Inferiority has rusted Olivia, and every time she imagines his preference, her skin chips away to the hopelessness beneath.

"..you don't know what Peter's thinking." Nina tells her, and speaks of her and William Bell and their unrequited affection. "Don't make the same mistake that I did." She warns, "If you want to know how Peter feels, ask him."

It's a simple thing, a solved question, but for the first time in three years, Olivia fears easy answers.

* * *

The red ink had taunted her, flaunted its bleeding cynicism against the cardboard cup back drop.

_Milk_; in her coffee this morning, he'd given her milk.

The _X_ in the box had been a lipstick colored indication of his silent pining, and the bitter-cream liquid of that delicate signal had soured her tongue.

And as she sits now, in the home of their latest suspect, Peter hands her an album and remarks on the pictures.

"So who is she?" he asks, and she scans the laminated photos, sees an attractive brunette in cameos and boots.

"She's obviously important to him." Olivia responds, "Maybe she knows where he is."

As she watches the sunlight gleam off the plastic sheets, she asks herself if one day, he'd have had _that_ _her _tucked in four by six compartments like these. And it's curling despondence into the pit of her stomach.

"You okay?" He asks, and she knows this isn't time or the place but the stinging depression wrenches her gut.

"Do you still think about her?" she asks, her words thrill and her breath, fast.

Goddamn that beautiful muscle and how it creases his questioning brow.

"Excuse me?"

"Well you've bought me a hundred cups of coffee and you know that I take it black with one sugar," she laughs, maybe bitterly, maybe out of spite. "but this morning you brought me one with milk and I'm assuming that that's way the other Olivia like hers."

He bows his head, inhales heavily, and she braces herself for what can only validate her heartsickness.

"Yes." he answers "I think about her all the time."

It burns being swallowed, that validation, and it leaves a sick aftertaste of replacement lining her throat.

"I think about how she used my feelings for you to manipulate me. How she lied to me and everybody-"

"Before you knew she wasn't me." she cuts him off, "She was fun right? She had an easier smile, I mean, that's what you said."

"I said that because I wanted you to know, that I noticed the differences." he interjects. "But I thought that was because of me, because of us."

Again, she feels the bitter ire of selfishness poking her right-side.

"I thought I was bringing out a different side of you." He says this and she feels a slow overtaking of something dreary, like wet smoke, a musky thickness that creeps from her government-issue jacket sleeves to wrap her up in his grey-blue stare.

"But it was never because I wanted to be with her more." His voice is softer, like his features become, "because I don't."

Silence envelopes them now, as she makes sense of the rapacious, fog-like gravity weighting her to the bed.

It's the dying of hope, his hope, that's crawled its way under her skin and echoed through the down hairs on the back of her neck.

He's taking her distance, her failure to let go of the past, as rejection and it's only cementing his greatest of fears; losing her and having to find some way in hell, to be okay with it.

When he shifts, inhales, she's weightless again, released from his synchrony, and he shakes his head before apologizing for the coffee.

The mistake seems so small now, after her body's violation, and she struggles to form words in the aftermath of his choke-hold.

There's an interruption, in the doorway, and as the SWAT officer speaks, she remembers where she is, and why.

"Finish up here?" is all she asks Peter, an un-warranted response to issue back again her lost proficiency.

He nods and as she leaves, she feels his after-shock drain from her pores.

Just as she does the hope, some part of her, wants him to hold on to.

* * *

In her hands, she flips over the file, feels the manila smooth her finger-pads before eyeing the man seated before her.

He's downtrodden, stoic, a dark figure seated at the end of the hallway. Before her is a saddened person, a could-have-been somebody, with his head bowed behind the glass doors of the hospital's waiting room. His capability has brought him here, to them, his powers, unlike hers but given through the same childhood experiments.

The minds he reads are voices trapped in his head, painful knives that stab at the base of his skull. He's a prisoner to the world, constantly pushing into a cold corner by thoughts not meant to be heard.

The cortexiphan trials have ailed him, damaged him, and Olivia familiarizes with every calcified pore in her bones.

Like she, he's a result of a volatile past; he's become a broken person.

"Look at him." She says to a silent, patient Peter beside her. "He can barely function around people. The cortixiphan trials have ruined his life. He's broken."

"Olivia, I know what you're thinking."

This makes her turn, look at him, because whatever self-confidence she still has feels remarkably wounded. And part of her, the tiny fibers that still coil in his air beg for the assurance that she's set apart and stronger then her same-class mate before them.

"You and he are nothing alike."

And her damaged tissue of independence recoils, retracts, because the power in his brow reminds her again why she needs him beside her.

Regardless of how split she feels, how miserably unfixable, he makes her self-disapprobation loose credibility at the feet of his faith in her.

And she wants to hate that about him, because she's told herself this per-functionary dance in mysteries and science is the only way she can need him.

But it's faltering, that lie, because she knows, she can feel, that he sees through that mistruth too.

* * *

_Later the night James Heath attacked her, Peter met her on his doorstep._

_From her hair ends to her toes, she'd still fizzled with the chemical pull he'd wrapped her in and hours after he'd left her side, after she'd filed a report and said goodnight to Broyles, she'd driven to the Bishop's place with reasons unclear._

_Though she'd devised, logically, through her bullhorn loud heartbeat, that she'd merely wanted to report of Mr. Heath's prognosis._

_It had nothing to do with the name that hours ago, bonded itself to her ribs_

_When he'd walked up, to the bottom steep of his sidewalk, she'd understood the futility of lying to one's self._

_He'd neared her, but he hadn't been shining, wasn't pearlescent, mesmerizing this time, but still somehow, he'd been a beautiful sight._

_"Olivia, what-." He'd climbed the last step to be two feet before her. "I was just on an errand for Walter. What are you doing here? Is everything okay?"_

_He'd opened his hands, rose his brow, and when out of concern he'd touched her elbow, she'd dug her nails in her palms to diffuse the static._

_"Ugh, yeah, yeah. No everything's fine. It's good." She'd given him a small smile and assured, he'd dropped his arms._

_Then he'd frowned, tilted his head in a silent question, and she'd caught herself admiring the planes of his face in the gold hue of the porch-light._

_"I um, I just wanted to let you know about James Heath." She says, collecting her runaway concentration, "He's been taken to a facility run by Massive Dynamic. They believe with the right therapy and doctors, he can learn to control his abilities."_

_Olivia had pressed her lips closed then, rubbed her hands together, prayed like hell he wouldn't set off anymore neuro-chemicals._

_Even then, she could only control so much of the hyperactivity he'd wracked through her body._

_He'd nodded, then slightly his lips lifted at the corner before he'd repositioned the black bag slung over his shoulder._

_In a way different then she, even then, he could see right through another person._

_Her._

_"You didn't come all thy way here to tell me something you could have said over the phone, did you?"_

_His smile had tugged, a self satisfied smug of knowing how she is._

_And if she hadn't begun to drown in his colors already, she'd have suffocated in them then, at one o' clock in the morning on a cool night in September, with her heart in her throat and his eyes a glittering green._

_"You're right." She'd admitted, slightly embarrassed. "I didn't. I ugh-" She'd scrambled for an excuse before choosing one. "I wanted to come and say thank you, again, for earlier."_

_Again, he'd frowned, his brow unconvinced, but light from the lines at the corner of his eyes. She'd lowered her own to her feet and rubbed the skin of her thumb._

_"It felt good to have you there."_

_Her voice had been hushed, quiet, almost lost in the night air rustling around them. She'd have had to pull her coat tight if he hadn't reached out to lift her chin._

_"It felt good to be there," he says, and what he'd truly meant was thank you for letting me, for allowing me into another part of the trust you guard with your life._

_There'd been an exchange then, of appreciation and chemistry, while something silent flitted through Olivia's synapses to set flame to her neurons._

_It made her walk into him, put her arms around him, inhale the scent of cordovan and leather that's inherently Peter, inherently dangerous like the world that he's from. And she'd clenched the hem of his jacket, knowing how difficult and impossible, it would be to let him go. So she'd taken him in, and grazed her lips on his neck, and she'd blame the close proximity later if she'd had to._

_At that moment, all she wanted was to feel his heat, his right-in-front-of-her-in-this-world-realness melt into her. And it had, but as she'd held on to his body, she'd held on to her resolve, so she'd had to step back and away from him and her weakness._

_He'd brushed a hand through her hair after they'd broken apart, and when he touched her cheek, she'd felt her skin scorch under his palm._

_"I'll always come for you, Olivia."_

_On that night, on his sidewalk, she'd felt hope for the first time that maybe, just maybe, she'd be enough to ground him, in this universe with her._

_Because there was nothing else she could hope in to keep him here._

_And as the thought frightened her, that he could resent her for the secret she shared with his father, panic began to smother her whole._

_That's when he'd glimmered again, and she'd sucked in a breath, closed her eyes on his bright light to lean into his touch. She'd squeezed her lids closed to fight back wet heat, and confused by her struggle, his other hand graced her side to steady her pose._

_"Hey, whoa," she'd heard him say, "are you sure you're okay?"_

_She'd nodded, bit her bottom lip, and he'd illuminated her vision when she focused her eyesight._

_It had been unlike her, to run her hand over the cotton against his chest or to rest it above the warmth of his heart, but she'd done it anyway._

_Because he'd redefined everything she thought she was._

_"I'm fine." she lies. "I'm just tired."_

_This seemed to satisfy him because he'd smiled, warm and tempting, and when he'd dropped his hands, it left her cold._

_"Go home, Olivia." He'd said through curved lips, "Get some sleep."_

_Then he'd put more space, air, and her dismay, between them._

_"Yeah." she'd responded, quietly, knowing rest is the last thing on her mind._

_"I'll see you tomorrow."_

_He'd matched her tone, and as he'd brushed her arm and turned toward the house, he'd left her lips incredibly lonely._

_But she'd only bitten down on them, because though it had been weeks, they'd never spoken again of Jacksonville and thier almost kiss._

_She'd had an overwhelming urge, to do so then._

_"Peter." she called out and he turned back to her, his form no longer glimmering but glowing from the moonlight and his entryway._

_"If we'd let something happen, in Jacksonville-" she begins her pulse racing, "Where do you think we'd be right now?"_

_In answer he catches her gaze, a blue-green fire of desire and tenderness that pulls her down from the shoulders._

_"I think we wouldn't be saying goodnight."_

_There'd been too many nerves, too many fleeting butterflies whishing her skin for Olivia to have thought straight. But she hadn't the need, because before she could respond, he'd done it for her._

_"Goodnight, Olivia." he'd said simply and though she'd felt her heart drop, two inches, maybe three, they hadn't been teenagers blindly jumping in front seats._

_They'd been adults, and maturity incurred time to sort things out, to think things through._

_So she'd ignored her primal urges and hadn't followed him in. Instead she'd responded in kind, and told him goodnight._

_Until weeks later, she wouldn't know the irony in his earlier vow, when she'd come to test his promise and he'd prove his word._

_He'd come for her, and she'd risk her life, because she'd felt in all the ways he aggravated her nerves, her pulse, her body, that it was nothing but the truth._

_So helped her God._

* * *

The pencil glides across the paper, sketching long, charcoal colored hairs in the grain of the fibers. Being drawn is a woman, beautiful, confident with wide eyes and a strong jaw.

"She's perfect." the man remarks, when Olivia asks who she is. Simon's gaze is fixed on his creation, a concentration borne of being one's own company for years. His brows are lifted, sad, and Olivia understands why as he shades open lines.

"You haven't met her, have you?"

She asks and he answers, saying how it's impossible to be open when he'd simply be pitied, looked down upon; flirting is merely friendliness because he knows other's true feelings.

"I'm too much of a freak for her to love anyway."

This kicks Olivia's chest, drops it's core muscle to the ground under her feet. His words have bruised Peter's leftover faith, and again she's coming unraveled and fighting for worth.

"But, you don't know that." she tells him, tasting the words for herself. "That's what you're afraid is going to happen. And so what if you find out that she's not interested, or, or there's somebody else on her mind, or that she doesn't love you. I mean isn't it, isn't it better to know."

A twisting sadness, lined in envy, has her sternum chasing after her heart.

"No one should know exactly what someone else is thinking."

He responds sure and certain, but Olivia's too determined of her own need to honestly listen.

"Probably not." she says, "But I wouldn't mind having that ability right now."

After the admission, Simon studies her face, her pained expression, and when he turns his attention to the hallway, Peter's there speaking on the phone.

It's obvious to this man, of her Achilles heel, her weakness, and Olivia straightens her back to try and collect her mental composure.

_You were always the one relied on, _she'd been told, when they speak of the trials, _you were always the strongest._

And look at her now, twenty six years later, and one, beautiful otherworldly man has undone her, become her own brand of kryptonite.

He wasn't like them, broken and compromised from the cortexiphan experiments, but little did Peter know he had his own special power.

The ability to undo the vigilant, and leave her searching for herself and the strength he steals away.

* * *

Three weeks.

21 days.

504 hours; that's how long it's been since she's faced her personified undoing.

In her minds eye she can still see the college ruled lines of Simon's revealing, scribbled note.

Simon says;

_He still has feelings for her._

Those were the words written in the thin white of a row, and Olivia had sat for what seemed like hours, staring at the led until her eyes burned from not blinking.

Simon says; it's not worth the fight.

Some distant, faraway reverie of their reconciliation died in her clenched hands that night.

It'd drowned in a whiskey bottle's lattice and her anger, her dejection, left glass shards falling onto her living room carpet.

And those broken pieces became her last internal berating.

As days past, she'd turn on a radio she wouldn't listen to or a TV she wouldn't watch, any remote white noise to loud out the quite mollifications in her head. And she'd kept busy, too, by calling Rachel, sorting her e-mail and even organizing her kitchen cabinets.

Twice.

There hasn't been a new case, (to her relief) so she'd back-read through her stack of them.

Until she began to see Peter, sprawled out on her couch, throwing theories into the air while she sat behind the coffee table.

Too much of him still lurks in the memory of her home, so she'd jog at nights, too, to forget, until she passed out with exhaustion.

Then this morning, she'd gotten a call.

Not from Peter, but his father, and over the elder Bishop's morning munching, was a jumble of words she'd formed into a sentence.

She was needed and it was urgent.

And she'd be remiss to admit she didn't miss the absent minded professor and his admirable quarks.

So she'd slipped on her three quarter length coat, and its tightly knit cotton would hold to her, in the way something homey and recognizable comforts the lonely.

She'd hug it straight through to her bones if she'd had too, because she needed something to hold to herself.

Falling apart in front of him, even after so much time, wasn't a risk she cared to take. Especially when she'd been trying to build up again all the pragmatic defenses he knocked down.

Because Simon says; She's a big girl, with a job she loves and a calling she's good at it, and it's time she remembers there's more to life then what she's lost.

* * *

_On a country road in somewhere Connecticut, he'd made his first lasting impression on her bruised and guarded heart._

_They'd been together only days by that time, and she'd worn strict business in every solid thread of her character._

_He'd been behind the wheel, and she'd just been jerked awake by the rental car's harsh thumping._

_"Sorry." He'd said innocently. "I tried to avoid that deer."_

_His mouth had tilted upward, but seeing her un-amused by the intrusion, his grin fell._

_"Pothole." he'd explain, flatly, "It was a joke."_

_She'd been to professional, too hard to play her complicated life soft, so she couldn't be amused though a small, childlike part of her fought to break through and smile._

_She hadn't allowed it to surface. Not then, not after she'd just lost John for good, pondered her own sanity and was introduced to the difference between the real and impossible._

_Turns out they'd played in the same sandbox, after all._

_He'd stopped at a gas-station, somewhere between the town precinct and their route to the airport. He'd picked up coffee and the donut that left a smudgy, chocolate trace on the console's gray leather._

_"You hungry?" he asks her, when she hugs her overcoat from the fall air leaking through his slit window._

_She'd been bracing herself, against the growl hollowing her ribcage, but she'd told him she's fine._

_She can live through anything she can fight._

_"When you are. I got you these."_

_He'd set a brown, fiber plastic bag on her lap. The corner had been peeled away, and the package, crinkled with handling._

_She'd frowned before picking up the bag, pegging him to be the kind of person who re-gifts what he decides he doesn't want._

_She'd thought then, that she'd had him figured out, partly selfish, partly considerate, and always waiting for the best excuse to run._

_As if he were a caged mammal, waiting to escape again back into the wild._

_But she'd been wrong. And she'd realize it next._

_"I ugh, I picked out all the yellow ones." he'd told her simply._

_Stunned, she'd felt her chest swell, in something like admiration and surprise, she'd felt, for the first time in weeks something she'd couldn't comprehend._

_The ability to again, truly and earnestly, feel un-alone._

_"I've noticed you never eat them." He says, "So I took them out before I gave them to you."_

_She'd never been taken so aback by a gesture so sweet, or an attention paid so close to know the way she eats her M and M's._

_And for what she'd known of him, he wouldn't ask of her aversion, so out of a small and hidden gratefulness, she'd told him why._

_"Ever since I was a kid, they reminded me of medicine." She'd said. "So I don't eat them. I guess it's just a habit I'm use to."_

_She'd shrugged her shoulders, in part embarrassed and in part, shy. He'd smiled then, when she'd tipped the bag up, and the candy covered chocolates had fallen into her palm._

_"I don't eat Starburst." He'd told her, cocking his head to the side, " I've never liked the way they stick to my teeth."_

_For some reason, she'd won custody of her inner child then, and she'd smiled, wide, because she'd felt, in some tampered down recess of her mind, that Peter Bishop was more that meets the eye._

_"I didn't know you noticed," She'd said honestly, and watched smile lines contour his face._

_"I didn't think you'd want me to."_

_After he said this she discovered his true sense of perception. Her pride had been in her own self containment, her need to stay unnoticed, to not stand out. What mattered where the lives of others and not her own._

_And he'd figured that out, too._

_She'd been use to staying in the background and he'd brought her center stage. In that car, in that year, she'd didn't know how to feel about that._

_So she'd simply said thank you, and he'd nodded, saying no problem._

_On that day, Olivia had realized, he'd forever keep her guessing._


	5. Chapter 5

They're standing in his foyer when the beat under her clavicle becomes a fast staccato.

This is the confrontation she'd tried to avoid by slipping out his front door not moments ago.

But Peter's called her name, and because of his goddamn, involuntary gravity, she turned to face him.

It takes nanoseconds for his air to become her cage, trapping her in the angst she'd discovered when Walter left them alone. She'd come this morning for what's become a forced merging, an elder Bishop's plea to a truce in the excuse of blueberry pancakes.

But there's no white flag here, only the punishment of lost words to her one-sided, helpless impasse.

Right now, she's recklessly asphyxiated by her inescapable quagmire.

She was in love on her own, and she was stranded by it.

And she felt exposed in it, left defenseless and naked before her grey-green undoing.

"I don't really know what to say."

She admits, and staring him down, she begins to grow irritated with herself, and him, heated by her relentless longing and his insincerity.

_That her_ has taken him and fucked up her happy, and dammit she's been punched in the chest, because it hurts like hell to breathe.

"I know that you still think about her." she tells him. "I know that you had feelings for her and that you still do."

She's lightheaded, from her maddening disappointment and it's dispensing something like anger.

"And quite frankly," she continues, "I don't think you've been completely honest with me."

He nods, and looks to the ground as she tastes betrayal again.

She's accustom now to it's sickly-sweet pungency.

After a beat, he tells her she's right, that he hasn't told her everything.

"Mostly because I didn't think-"

"That I could handle it?" she finishes, and a red evanescence saturates her vision, colors him in the hue of her frustration.

In defense, he frowns, and that beautiful line deepens.

"I know that you struggle with trust issues." He tells her, his voice rigid, "I know that you struggle with letting people in."

"I'm struggling because the reasons are real, I'm not making them up."

"I know." he remarks. "I never wanted to be one of the reasons."

This tempers her, with the superiority of his stare, so she's quiet, testing the sincerity.

"And I still think about her, because I've spent so long, imagining going down that path with you. Imagining what it would be like to wake up in a bed next to you."

Sadness squeezes into her invisible cell, and it's left her finger-pads throbbing from a familiar reverie.

"To-to sit around, just the two of us, having a cup of coffee, reading the paper. And then finally, I had it."

Envy too, is tempting to spend her, with a rage that tenses her every muscle.

"I've seen what the two of us looks like and it's beautiful."

He finishes, almost shimmy shaking her bones, but she won't lose herself in his sentiment.

"She's the one who's taken it away from us, not me."

"And now?" he asks, calm, hitting her with a reality that's tight in her lungs. "Who's the one stopping us now?"

And she's been backed into a corner that's threatening to crush her whole. Even the home of her jacket felt more constricting then assuring.

She's beginning to feel shame, a dark sheen that's coating her self-righteousness to make her ten times smaller.

All this time, all this rage, and hate and misery, for that monster in her skin, and all she's done is sold him out to save herself.

And she'd never felt more selfish, more undeserving, then she does right now.

* * *

_Three days after the Allister Peck case, they'd met up for drinks._

_The bar had been crowded, loud, dank with the smell of alcohol and sweat, and after a bottle of whiskey, and two chasers, they'd agreed to walk off the buzz with a late night stroll._

_They'd gotten on the topic somehow, of their case leader's persona, and as the sidewalk had curved, liquefied from her intake, Olivia had hooked her arm in Peter's to better steady herself._

_"You're serious?" she'd pressed him, a question to his just-made statement. "Our Broyles?"_

_And Peter had smiled, shoved his hands in his pockets, and it hugged her arm to his side. Funny how through a pre-inebriated, post- tipsy phase, his singing of her skin cells had still hit her full force._

_"Don't seem so surprised." he'd remarked, "You have to admit he's intimidating at first."_

_In the way all things amuse through hazy glasses of brandy and rum, she'd laughed at this._

_"He'd scared me a little," he'd said, still defensive, "It was the luminous dome and rock-hard demeanor."_

_Her breath had filled the air between them, little fits of amusement that he'd pulled from her diaphragm._

_"I promise you, I will never be able to pull off the overtly serious and bald look." He thinks for a moment. "I'd make a terrible Observer."_

_After she catches her breath, and after he'd joined in her juvenile enjoyment, a question, borne of curiosity, laced in the careless trepidation of alcohol stemmed from her lips._

_"What about me? Did I ever scare you?"_

_She'd asked him this as her eyes followed their shadows, black silhouettes in the pavement cast by yellow orange street lights._

_The concentration made her squint from the head-pain._

_"Oh yeah, you were a woman on a mission with a temper and a gun. I kid you not, I was shaking in my boots."_

_She laughs again, full and breathy, before he finishes._

_"But you were hot, so I got over it."_

_This added warmth to the red-blush of Crown Royal on her cheeks._

_"And now?" she asks him, "What do you think of me now?_

_"Oh, you're still hot. Especially with the gun."_

_Flustered, she'd slapped his arm playfully, and when she'd turned her eyes to him, the moon and streetlights fought for the high arcs of his face._

_She'd never seen him so serene._

_"I'm serious." She tells him, post-amusement. "How do you see me now?"_

_"How do I see you?" They walked a few paces as he'd tasted the words, and the pause almost made her want to rethink her question._

_But her alcohol induced fearlessness won over her apprehension to know, for sure, if she beat under his chest the same way he did her._

_"You're reverent, determined, with a relentless selflessness that makes you reckless. You don't think twice about your own life and it scares the shit out of me."_

_His tone was no longer playful as before, but serious and collected._

_"But I admire the hell out of you for it. There's something to be said about a passion like yours."_

_"And what's that?"_

_She'd asked him, studying the way his eyelashes caught the night lights, little specks of glittered stars that had fallen to his glory._

_"Awe-inspiring. I'm amazed by you Olivia."_

_When he'd looked at her then, with a deep, tender admiration, she'd quit breathing, started taking in his air through merely the pores of her body._

_His magnificence had threatened to turn her soul inside out._

_And she'd had an intensely hot urge to lean in and kiss him. But the numb of her lips had reminded her, somehow, that she'd lived on practicality._

_"Your turn."_

_He tells her, his voice louder, and when he turns to walk again, she'd wondered at what point they'd stopped._

_"My turn?"_

_She'd questioned, trying to wrap her head around coherency._

_Peter and libations had a way of becoming a mind-boggling duo._

_"Yeah, what pleasant misconception did I first give you?"_

_He presses and she'd remembered their first day together._

_"Oh, you irritated the hell out of me. I couldn't stand you." she laughed. "I thought you were a pain in the ass."_

_"Thank you. I get that a lot."_

_Then she'd turned her eyes down, and her words grew softer._

_"But you changed my mind."_

_She'd paced her thoughts with their steps and after seconds of silence, she'd continued._

_"You're patient Peter, kind, with a hidden compassion that drives the heart of you. And if two years ago, it didn't make you stay, for Walter, for me, we wouldn't be here together." She'd stopped suddenly, to look at him._

_"And I'd be missing you right now."_

_Deep in her bones, she'd felt the validity of her words, and her screaming conviction had filled the quiet he'd shown._

_And surprise had met astonishment, had bore the indent of his brow before he'd raised one._

_"Guess I made up for the asshole first impression."_

_He'd remarked, and in the shyness caused by revealing sentiments, she'd tilted her head and shrugged a shoulder._

_"And by far, at that."_

_He'd added, and soft blue, darkened to a navy sea had stared into her._

_And when the silent chemistry, his noiseless, reverent current had teetered on the precipice of what she could handle, she'd broken away before it could tilt and fall her._

_More then the whiskey, he'd left her lightheaded._

_For a forever-long moment they hadn't spoke, just walked in tandem to the beat of their stride._

_Then he'd broken through the quiet._

_"If you want, I can poke you, for nostalgia's sake."_

_Leave it to him, to have turned something intimidating, so easily airy._

_So she'd laughed again, because on that day, she could._

_And to her disappointment, they'd made it to her apartment sooner then she'd liked._

_When she'd called him hours earlier, she feared he'd try and decipher why she couldn't stay away from him._

_And on that thought, before her eyes, he'd became incandescent, illuminate, and she'd tore her eyes from his glimmer to the ground._

_She'd been shaken on that night, by every form of his radiance, and whether it was the whiskey or his fire, her temples ached with exhaustion._

_Despite the excuse of 95 proof double shouts, she'd known she had to run, get upstairs and cage herself before she'd stained her sleeves red in that moment, with her heart or his truth._

_And though he'd been standing right there before her, for a second, she'd felt inherently alone._

_Funny how the secrets you keep become your closest company._

_Her head spun, as she'd blinked her eyes closed, a pressing of her held tongue and liquor that hammered on the front=side of her skull._

_"I had fun tonight." she'd heard him say, "Thanks for getting me out."_

_She rose her head and through the banshees in her skull, she'd met his smile._

_"Thanks for coming." Her pulse deafened other sounds to white noise as he inched closer._

_Then he'd reached out, and when he'd tucked a loose hair behind her ear, his heat scorched her cartilage._

_And his eyes scorched her soul._

_With his mouth so close, he'd said her name, softly, gently, and she'd breathed it in._

_"I don't know of anyone, who sees me the way you do."_

_In the pit of her stomach, an exciting apprehension had arisen, to pull him by the black collar of his pea- coat and into her lips._

_But irony won out, as he'd shone before her with an evanescent glimmer._

_"That makes two of us."_

_His magnificence hushed her, rendered her stasis with devastation if he were to leave her here in this world, alone without his beauty._

_And then he'd pulled her into him, and she'd inhaled bourbon and cool water as she pressed into his chest._

_He'd engulfed her, with his arms and his warmth and the hands that raked through her hair._

_Then he'd kissed the top of her head, the side of her forehead, leaving little mini fires where his lips excited her skin._

_"I'd miss you, too," He'd whispered, his breath heating her neck, and tickling her ear._

_And she'd closed her eyes, leaned into him, pressed her cheek to the stubble that reddened her flesh. A heated yearning, an overwhelming of desire singed through her follicles to rest low in her abdomen._

_Then he'd pushed away, and she'd been lost in the night to the whirl of lust, and vodka and his inertia._

_His hand traced her shoulder blade, her arm, and found hers as he'd begun to back away._

_"I'll see you tomorrow." he'd told her, squeezing her hand, and to smile, was all she can do from yanking him back and into her embrace._

_You'd better, she'd wanted to say, because Walter could in this night, tell him the truth and bid him run._

_She'd clenched her jaw on the thought, already feeling helplessly lonely, helplessly chilled, as his grip began to leave hers. And then she couldn't handle it anymore, all of these almost could-haves, and maybe- should- haves with him. And she'd blame it on the rum later, when she'd pulled him back and found his mouth with her own._

_There was honey, whiskey, and something dark, on his lips, and she'd savored every taste with her tongue, a passion borne of mystery, synchrony, and infinite need. Like she'd envisioned, she'd pulled on his jacket, melding them together till teeth clashed against teeth, body clashed against body and she'd taken in every flavor on the ample flesh of his mouth._

_Then he'd pulled back, and his chest rose and fell from the air she'd stolen._

_He'd left her lips tingling, swollen, and when she'd opened her eyes, peered into grey-green, his were a half lidded lusting of what's left them breathless._

_But they weren't going to act on it, she wouldn't allow herself to pull him upstairs and into her bed. They both know, for now, this is what this is, a kiss excused by lapse of judgment, borne not of unspoken desire but a half bottle of Jack Daniels._

_There was no jeopardizing done here._

_"Goodnight Peter." she'd whispered._

_So he smiled at her in the moonlight, and nods in a haze of understanding as he brings his hand to her collarbone, then traces her bottom lip with his thumb._

_"Best one I've ever had." he whispers, filling her soul with the husk of his octave._

_And for the next six hours they'll be apart, alone, left ungracefully to their own justifications in the aftermath of what they'd done._

* * *

For the nineteenth time today, she convicts her due diligence of abandoning her weeks ago.

Harm had taken its place, the petulant kind of ire and reprehend that reasonable people avoid placing on another.

So reason, it would seem, had sold her out too, because she feels two feet tall, miniscule and shame-worthy after facing her faults through his rightfully placed blame.

And this morning, at the crime scene on the sixth floor, she 'd chided herself for losing her own responsibility. He'd made her feel such reproach by merely having been next to her.

And it's right that he did so. For how clueless she'd been, she'd deserved it.

And all day, she'd tried hard not to feel every eye on her, as if they knew somehow of her opprobrium; her vicious, curling self-contempt that made her sick to her stomach since she'd walked out his door.

He'd leaded her to the bones with the paranoia of the guilty.

But through the game of facts meets theory, she'd forced mental strength, adhered herself to the case and its story because she was good at deflecting.

It was here now though, in the front seat of her car, she again feels obsolete, deserving and liable of the remorse that's enclosed her.

It appeared when he'd got out to fill up the tank.

At her feet is the seismograph, the one they're going to use to measure what an incredulous Walter suggested was a hole in their universe, a potential vortex signaling the destruction of life.

As if she didn't feel sullen enough, the old metal case against her boots completely dismays her.

The end of the world would be indurate, merciless, burying her alive with too many regrets.

And maybe she's too greedy to ask for a sympathetic last dance.

On the thought she's overtaken, smothered by a claustrophobia of mild sadness and hot air, so she cracks her window and attacks her lungs with the winter cold.

And the icy chill eases her panic, directs her back to a reality where she controls her own fate.

Maybe it's possible, in her insuperable life, that happy endings aren't awarded but created.

At the end of the world, she doesn't have to be alone.

The driver's door chimes open then, rushing the cabin with a shrill breeze and his gene-specific collision of her cells. And in what seemed like minutes in the time span of seconds, her newly-formed epiphany has escalated his significance.

He's irritated, mildly, speaking of the waiting line or late night chill, but she doesn't hear.

Of all the times he's struck her with his beauty, she's never been so floored as she is now, with the fluorescence of the gas station's pagoda turning his eyes to Agate. He's ethereal in its wavelengths, haloed with a phosphorescence that bounces off his body, and makes her oblivious to the cold.

Through his surreal dominion he's broken through her somber cage.

She's never felt more in love then she does now.

And she ducks her head, hiding some kind of giddy, sudden urge to smile.

At the end of the world, she could be sharing in his light.

If only she restored what morale they'd lost first.

On the thought she digs her toes in her shoes, feels the friction of her socks awake the friction in her chest.

_God, _at this point, she owed him so much more than an apology. But maybe I'm sorry is a good place to start.

He flips on the blinker, and she forms words in her head with the pace of its backbeat.

Then he turns, and she jumps head first.

"You were right." she says, "This morning, you were right."

She picks, at some invisible thread at the waist of her pea-coat, to ashamed to tear her attention from the bulk fold to his face.

"I did this to us." she confirms, "I'm the reason we're still broken."

Her vision blurs, at the corner of her eyes and she whips her head up, catching the swell. Her chest recesses and her lungs, retract.

"I'm sorry, Peter." she dares look at him now. "For all of it, for everything."

Behind the wheel, he's tensed, and as the traffic lights cast Christmas colors on his face, she watches as he bites his bottom lip. But his eyes have turned to marine, and if it wasn't for their softness, she'd assume him almost angry.

"I know." he responds simply, and for seconds, their both quiet.

She doesn't know what more to say as he parks the car. But instead of turning it off, killing the ignition and stepping out, he simply sits, with his hands on the wheel and his eyes out the windshield.

The tension crawls from the bottom of her spine to the fingers in her coat-pocket and she inhales a tight breath. She'd be waiting for some kind of his quiet anger if she didn't feel an un-situational calm, a confusing relief.

And her muscles contract from it; his fusion.

"Olivia, something's only broken, if you can't fix it." he says finally, then he turns to her.

"I'm right here, and I always will be."

_So do something about it,_ he's said, with the obsidian heat behind her grey-blue entrapment.

From this simple response with gargantuan incentive, all she can grasp through cerebral quandary, is this is how he loves her.

Simply, blindingly, without warrant and with an infinite passion.

So all he she can do is say _I know_ in a whisper, because there's an optimism crushing her complex of response. It's breeched from the way his mouth curves.

"C'mon." he says, flipping the car off before pocketing his keys. "Let's go save the world."

He opens his door, then when he stops, she frowns in question.

"You'd wonder how many times we have to do this till we get superhero names."

This makes her laugh, breathy, and wholeheartedly and the boy-like twinkle in his eye fills her with something she'd once thought lost to them.

An assuring kind of hope.

* * *

With the excuse of fries, he'd cajoled her into thinking this bar was a good idea. And she had to admit that she'd put up little fight.

He was at the jukebox, behind her, searching for something to fill the air he'd complained needed tunes.

They had to stay in this pub, close to the Rosencrantz building, to wait for the last minute calibrations that could harbor their doom. She'd brought up the question outside, if he'd thought the world was ending, and in the fashion of Peter Bishop, he'd responded by pointing to this joint.

He didn't want to wait for demise in twelve degree weather, he'd answered, and right now, as she felt her skin thaw in the bar's roomy heat, she added another point to his beautiful I.Q.

Since their talk in the car their camaraderie has changed, it was easy again, like before she'd dismissed sensibility and thrived on broken remnants.

By now, because of and through him, she knew what she had to do.

He comes to join her again, at the high bar table, and as though this building were backstage bleachers and he her high school love, a thrilling, frivolous carbonation rises from the pit of her stomach to swell in her chest.

Possibility has a way of reverting maturity back to the excite of flirty first experiences.

The invisible string, the one tethered to him that she's hooked on the other end of, has finally pulled in the middle and entwined them together.

And all she'd had to do was give up her tug of war.

She asks him, teasing, if he's selected "_Feelings_" as his song of choice, and he shakes his head.

He told her once that he's not a Morris Albert fan.

She's dilating the seismographs keypad, pressing on tiny buttons when he leans on the table to face her.

"Did I ever tell you about the time Walter did his rendition of "_Never, Never going to give you up_" for me?"

"No, but I love Barry White." she tells him, remembering her and Rachael dancing to "_Can't Get Enough Of Your Love_" in their Aunt's over-cluttered living room.

"He was only wearing his socks at the time,"

She sees Walter in a _Risky Business_ persona, sliding across their kitchen floor in nothing but skin and cottoned feet, and she throws her amused dislike in the air.

"He was doing the hustle..." he continues, and adding to the picture, this makes her laugh out loud.

But she doesn't want to envision anymore, his scantly clad father.

"Okay," she tells him, creating a halting gesture with her hands, "That's enough."

Over the rim of his beer bottle, he smiles, and overcome by this easy-going atmosphere, she drops her eyes to the tabletop.

This contentment is the light side he brings to her darkness.

And she never wanted to live in his gloriousness more.

"You know how you were talking earlier, about what it felt like when you thought you were with me? How you said it was beautiful?"

Remembering, he smiles, nods, says yeah as an answer and she continues.

"I want to know what that feels like."

Peering into his eyes, they're warm, tender, a transparency of grey-green that invites her in.

And she's use to feeling inhibited when she's so bold to risk her heart, but this time with him is different.

At the world's end, she wants to have lived in every part of his beauty.

A small discouragement breaks on his face, and when he swallows, he makes question of her.

"But?"

What he doesn't understand is there are no _'buts' _now, no excuses she can use to better off her independence. That scar tissue gave in when she'd forfeit her fight.

So she shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder, she's bare now, accepting and forgiving, and all she wants to do is taste every part of his splendor.

And she does, by closing the inches between them, and his mouth is the sweetness of sugar on the inside of a flower. It's a soft kiss, delicate, the tender caress of something still fragile, but then she opens her eyes, and she loses it all.

He's not bright anymore by her fascination, but by a glimmer, his pearlescent aura that throws a sick reality in her face.

He only glows when she's frightened, unhinged, scared of her own emotions and the volume of them.

So she must be all those things now if he's surrounded by essence.

What's stuck in her throat now is panic, the kind borne of sudden realization that spikes adrenaline through fear.

"Olivia...what?" he presses, seeing her distraught, and she feels suffocated in here, by the actuality that's squeezing her heart.

"I just have to get some air. I'm sorry" she says, quickly, and she heads for the door, too fast for him to question or follow.

This shouldn't have to be but it is.

She'd gotten lost in the appeal of dwelling in the fantastic. In reality, everything these past weeks, her vitriol, her resentment, her hatred and avoidance, were all rooted from a deeper source.

Fear. Of herself, and the happiness she isn't capable of.

With or _god forbid_, without him.

There's nothing more simple then an if-then formula.

And if he glimmers, then she's afraid and defenseless against her own doubt.

Apparently she can't take stock in faith and promise, because she shouldn't feel like this now, as though every hope in life has been ripped from her future.

So she's straining her diaphragm, trying to catch a breath in the frigid, icy air, against the pub's outside wall. But all her panic is firing through her muscles, leaving her antsy and restless to break out of her skin and find a safe-haven.

But the universe won't oblige her.

And maybe that's the way it always will be.

She hears her name, in the questioning tone of who she can't attain, and she stands straighter to prepare her explanation.

"Look whatever that was, if you think that it was a mistake-"

With his name and a swoop of her hand, she abruptly cuts him off.

"You glimmered." she explains, tucking sadness into the same pockets as her hands. "When we kissed, you glimmered."

And she's trying hard to hold it all in, but this derailing is swallowing her whole.

"So you're afraid?" he asks, because he understands how her over-there stuff works, and she nods.

"Afraid of what?" he presses, and she grasps onto her explication.

Damage precludes her from living under his halo.

"That you were right." she says to him. "That this isn't just about her. It was, but I think that this is me, I think that I'm stopping us. Maybe I'm just incapable of being vulnerable."

The weight of all her words are pressing into her full force, and even though it's ten degrees now on this loud main-street corner, she hears and feels nothing but her hopeless distemper.

"Olivia, c'mon, you know that that's not true." he tells her, and when he shifts under the bar's white light, she sucks in on his lingering shimmer.

"It must be." She remarks. "I'm terrified, that I can't fix this is just who I am."

She wants him to say something, anything to alleviate what mild anger has shot through her ribcage, but he's quiet, searching for the surface of this new deep drop.

It's unfair, all of this. Loneliness shouldn't be the price for saving the world.

But then again, what superhero ever lived happily ever after?

Not one she's ever read about.

Defeated, she shakes her head, drops her eyes from him, and when they turn to the Rosencrantz building, a new anticipation takes over.

High above, near the same apartment they'd explored this morning, there's a gleam illuminating a sixth floor window. It's the same glimmer that had wrapped him up minutes ago.

And she's stunned immobile because of it.

* * *

There isn't a seismograph in the car this time, but something even bigger, more foreboding.

Strapped in the SUV's bed is a compressed tank of Amber, the transparent, honey-colored life-ending glue they used over there when soft-spots broke through their universe and created a vortex.

They'd re-invented it over here, to stop such an unnatural disaster from occurring from that sixth-story glimmer.

Because of a quantum entanglement, a refusing-to-let-go by the tenant in 6B, an emerging had happened, an over-there breaking through of her dead husband's alternate.

The man she thinks is his ghost.

Alice Merchant can't accept a life alone, so she holds the world's end in her hand by sharing time with her over-there widower.

And what's in the armored cylinder behind Olivia is going to hold that breaking apart together.

_There needs to be an Amber for her emotional collaps_e_,_ she thinks, as Peter passes the car under another set of yellow-white street lights, the pros would outweigh the cons because at least she'd be stuck to feel indifference and not spread thinly raw.

It was like her to choose morbidity over anything easier.

As if it filled the air with its dark ambience, she feels the gloom purport of the large receptecle, seeping through upholstery and wool to leave phantom claw marks on her bare back.

The crisis out there is subtly echoed in here.

Desolation is drawn to her.

"You were wrong."

His voice is strong but soft, sharp with a determination that's cut thorough her morose to peak her brow.

"What?" she questions, grasping onto an idea that she didn't voice.

She's confused, waiting for his answer, and he worries his top lip with his tongue, as though weighing the context of words he's about to say.

And he navigates the atmosphere with their magnitude.

"Outside the bar, earlier." he explains, filling the silence. "You were wrong. We're only incapable of what we're afraid of. But even then Olivia, you don't fail."

There's a tennis ball in her throat, and it tears her esophagus as she swallows it down.

"Maybe it's different this time."

She says quietly, balling her hands in the bottom of her coat-pockets.

There's not enough room in the confines to hold her distress.

"It isn't." He says this so matter-of-factly, she's almost tempted to believe him. "You're not scared of vulnerability, Olivia, you're afraid to be happy."

The passing headlights capture his form, a left-lane double negative that drags his shadow to the back of the car.

Her stability has latched onto the back of it.

"And you don't have to be."

As if the thought were unfathomable, disagreeable, he opens his hands against the wheel to convey his argument.

"You act as if the world will end if you are."

She frowns, from his words and her own deplorability so she retorts.

"That's a pretty ironic statement right now, don't you think?"

Peter shakes his head, inhales a cross between a groan and a laugh, a two second frustration bourne of lost points.

"Look, Olivia.." His words stop short, as if he's thinking them over and when his tight grip on the wheel slackens, she feels her nerves calm.

She's prisoner to his demeanor.

"You're amazing, Olivia, unfaltering. Anything you set your mind to you accomplish because that's who you are. But you need to allow yourself happiness. You're meant to."

He looks at her, a navy-grey conviction that glows among the red of the street light, an Aurora Borealis caught in the softness of his eyes.

It strips her bare completely.

"How can you be so sure?"

She questions in whisper, and when he curves the corner of his mouth, her thoraic hollow grips the edge of his smile.

"Because you belong with me."

* * *

_The morning after she'd first kissed him, it'd been eight thirty in the morning by the time she'd arrived at the office._

_She hadn't been prone to tardiness and had thanked whatever deity had her back because the lab had been a ghost town. Then she'd remembered it'd been Thursday and so there'd been a Belgian waffle breakfast in the master plan of Walter Bishop._

_It'd meant she still had five minutes till he and Peter left Regina's Diner and five point three till they'd walk through the lab doors._

_And in relief to her earlier rush, she'd closed her eyes, had gripped the front of her desk and let herself breathe in on given time._

_Then her new norm had happened, snuck its way into her thought process like a child's roundabout appearing._

_Behind the darkness of her lids, she'd seen him, captivating and inviting with his boyish grin and swollen lips. It's a sight that had moved her clock forward till she'd drifted asleep at five a.m._

_Because restless is how he'd left her the night before, lost-in and wonderstruck from their post-tipsy doorstep embrace._

_A late alarm, two Advil and a shower later, she'd run out her door one hour, two minutes and thirty five seconds too late._

_She'd heard voices then, two tones of debate and laughter and as they'd grown closer, an almost panic set in, and she'd toyed around with faking a headache._

_Personal attachment had handed her a card she didn't want to play._

_She hadn't been any good in sensitive moments._

_They had a way of scaring her too much._

_But then again, they'd been a little inebriated, a little un-fully conscious in their borderline crossing._

_Before she'd knew it, Peter had been in her doorway, greeted her with a "Hey" and "Good Morning" so she'd turned to face him._

_"Gotchya something." he'd stated walking up to her._

_He'd handed her the paper bodied coffee, and she'd inhaled ground beans, his aftershave and the restaurant linger of hot griddles._

_Interesting that he'd smelled like the perfect morning._

_He'd asked her if she'd been there long, so she'd taken advantage of her first saving grace._

_"Ugh, only a while." she'd fibbed, then thanked him for the provision._

_When his smile had pulled in her chest, she'd turned her attention to the plastic cup between her palms._

_Somehow she'd have to manage again to look at him unaffectedly, but his goddamn cheeky grin had kept poking at the low-fire in her abdomen._

_Then her second grace had appeared, in the shrill of a phone's ring._

_That day, she must have been some higher power's choice recipient._

_She'd set her coffee down, answered it, but didn't recognize the voice when it asked for him._

_"It's for you." She'd said to Peter, pointing the hilt of the phone in his direction._

_He'd rose a brow, surprised._

_"Is it the Publisher's Clearing House hotline?" He'd teased, grabbing the device and she'd shook her head._

_"A little less automated." she'd answered, trying hard to dispel her intrigue, her too-quick jealousy that came when he'd put the female's voice to his ear._

_As he'd taken the call, while he'd left to situate Walter, she'd busied herself, re-stacking the papers on her desk or the files in its drawers. All in all, she'd had tried to act uninterested in why he'd been tying up the line._

_It had been his business after all._

_Then, phone in hand, he'd appeared again, with what she'd assumed was the kind of good mood brought on by indignant flattery._

_And she didn't want to name how she felt about that._

_But the fission he'd left the night before, from her lips to her toes, begged she lay stake to the cause of her undoing._

_She'd cleared her throat when he'd clicked the phone in its charger, and though she'd vowed to leave it be, her curiosity won out._

_"Everything okay?" she'd asked, prodding through a file she'd randomly plopped down on her desk-pad._

_"Yeah," he'd said, with the hint of a smile, and when he'd leaned on the front of her desk, she'd watched the muscles tighten in his forearms._

_So she'd sat up straighter, hoping any kind of movement would lessen what he'd surged through her solar plexus._

_"That was Mrs. Ericsson." he'd said, and she'd looked up at his conversational tone._

_"Mrs. Ericsson from upstairs?" she'd questioned, curious then if it had something to do with Walter and his occasional tank-cleaning excursions._

_"The very one." he responds. "She announced last week when I went to collect the Mad Professor, that her daughter's coming into town and she'd be flattered, if not delighted, if I were to wine and dine her. She wanted me to know she arrived today. Apparently, Mrs. Ericsson is in dire need of grandchildren."_

_Somewhere beyond the office wall, Walter began to sing, in some tune only he knew before there'd been a clank and bang of metal meets floor._

_Then, in a holler, he'd assured the office party that he's fine, he'd merely dropped a cake pan or two. And that maybe they should stay in the office if they're sensitive to homogeneous naturalism._

_"It scares me to think my future children could inherit those genes."_

_Ear to his father, he'd said this to the edge of her desk, with his eyes thin and mouth, amused._

_And it had surprised her._

_A time ago, roots to him were something to pull up, not implant._

_Now he'd spoke as though he'd rethought his position. It made her hopeful, with an eagerness to know why._

_Though the phantom spark of a twelve-hour-ago collision already gave her a pretty good idea._

_"You want kids?" she questioned, carefully, and he turns his eyes on her._

_"I've entertained the idea a bit."_

_This had tightened her chest, expanded its conclave till it threatened to combust._

_"You know a year ago, I didn't think I'd hear you say that."_

_"A year ago I wouldn't have."_

_In response she'd met his eyes. They'd darkened a little, like the grey ocean after sunset bathed in dark blue and twilight. And when his demeanor grew serious, she felt rigid from the capture._

_"What made you change your mind?" she prodded, her voice softer then she'd have liked._

_"The same reason I told Mrs. Ericsson I was already taken."_

_If there had been oxygen in her lungs, he'd sucked it all out. So when she'd breathed again, it'd felt like rough granite in her sternum._

_"What reason would that be?"_

_She'd swear, at the time, her voice was hardly a whisper._

_Then he'd leaned in closer, clashed his air into the personal space she could, at one time, safe-gate herself into. If she'd moved but six inches, she'd have tasted his mouth again._

_"You already know the answer to that."_

_On that day, at that time, there had been a sober re-iterating of his grip on her soul._

_There had been no alcohol to shoulder away what he'd implied, and she'd been mind-boggled from all the things they should come out and say._

_But her last saving grace had stood in the threshold, frustrated, defeated and very, very naked._

_"Pardon the intrusion but Peter, it seems I've misplaced my spatula again."_

_Walter's interruption had splayed her nerve endings, sending what lull Peter created into a manic seizure._

_Their moment had been broken and their silence again would hang from the ceiling; a lamp dimly lit, but never brightened._

_Something better left alone to lackluster then the candescence of their consciousness._

_And she'd preferred it stay there._

_She didn't do well with entrapment._

_In respsone, Peter had swore under his breath, but the smile cracking through his annoyance revealed his position._

_"I'm adding excellent timing to his array of eccentricities." he'd stated, rising from her desk and returning her self-space._

_Leaving her to feel oddly alone in her own air._

_Then he smiled at his father, wrapped his arm around the elder set of bare shoulders before turning him from the doorway._

_"C'mon Walter, wherever you've put your spatula, it better be with your pants."_

* * *

At Olivia's feet, glass shards and debris litter the floor of Alice Merchant's apartment.

They're the remnants of the almost-here other side vortex diffused not by the Amber but the woman seated before her.

Time has aged her, gracefully, and as Alice smiles, Olivia watches the skin tighten over the older woman's cheekbones, like rubber stretched then pinned at the sides.

"I'm not sure I'll ever understand what happened." Alice tells her, from across the ivory couch. "And I'm not sure it would make a difference if I did."

Lost to her own thoughts, the older woman fixes her gaze on something faraway in the middle of the room.

Thirty, heart-racing minutes ago, they'd been in time to convince her that she'd had to let her alter-husband go.

Through the gusts of wind, and plaster and lamps, Olivia shouted at Alice, explained the glimmering man and the chaotic consequence whirling around them.

But Alice refused to give in, even while the room was crumbling.

That kind of love, that's capable of breaking the world with infinite power, holds absolutely no bounds.

It's indistinguishable from magic.

And the memory of such power reminded Alice of the life she'd shared with her breaking-into-this-world doppelganger's likeness.

_Look around you_, Peter had said to her, through the threat of the vortex,_ there's evidence of a life shared with someone. You've already had what so many dream of._

And Alice had remembered, accepted, and she'd let go, but not on the hope that she'd see her real Derek again.

"Maybe you will." Olivia says to her, matching her smile to the old woman's optimism.

The two share a gaze reserved for the respect of comrades, two survivors spared of shared catastrophe.

A relief fills the air in the aftertaste of aversion.

"I'm lucky enough to have spent one lifetime with my Derek." Alice says, and her eyes twinkle on memory, a light blue hindering of secret moments lost to prying eyes. "I suppose wanting another now was asking too much."

Alice's face doesn't fall, instead it holds vigilant to the broken happy photos spread across the floor.

"I suppose when you know love like my Derek's and mine, it's enough to sustain you for five eternities." Then Alice turns to Olivia, and a question creases deeper the wrinkles at her eye's edge.

"That man who was here, Peter, he's more than just your partner isn't he?"

This sets Olivia's mind at a stand still, a shock of eighty-year old intuition that's sending subtle spasms under her collarbone.

She struggles for words when Alice raises a hand.

"The way he looks at you, for fifty years I saw that look in my Derek's eyes."

Shy, and a bit embarrassed, Olivia drops her head to her lap, but instead of black pleats she sees dusk, a dark blue that the sun's turning grey-green; his eyes on her before he'd left them alone.

Before he ever leaves her alone.

Then Alice stretches out her hand, and fingers a transparent cream stretched across bowed bones and knuckles, tap Olivia's lap and the agent looks up.

"That's love, my dear. The forever kind."

When Alice smiles, it fills Olivia with the optimism he'd set earlier in the car.

"Don't be afraid to know it." the fingers move, from Olivia's lap to her hand and they squeeze her own together.

Crazy how this woman, this tiny woman whom she's never met before could distill the emotional trickery that pleagues her every brain cell.

Life's full circles are drawn to her, unintended irony that reminds her now what free will is used for.

To map out our own path, to chose our own fate.

She's not a puppet to a higher power. There are no strings dictating which way she moves.

And thanks to this fragile, tender soul, she's finally convinced of it.

* * *

_Thick gobs of god-knows-what was caked into his hair._

_It was the first thing she'd noticed when he'd opened his door._

_Dried flour and sugar and egg fell onto his shoulders, trailed down his dark shirt to leave smudgy white footprints across the bulk of his chest._

_"I'm updating my nanny look." He'd said, in mock defense to her surprise, and when he'd wiped his hands on his jeans, powder sifted into the hallway._

_"I call this Mrs. Poppins meets Pillsbury."_

_His self-pride evident she couldn't help but laugh._

_Thanks to an impromptu interview, Rachel had dropped her niece at her doorstep four hours ago. Nine point five minutes before Olivia's own rescheduled meeting, the mandatory, fiscal kind that all seasoned agents look forward to four times a year._

_She'd have called Astrid if she wasn't out of town, the Johnson's if they'd been at home, so her only choice was the man across the threshold, dripping with raw pastry and oozing with eight p.m charm._

_"I'd say it's more Peter Bishop meets bowl and whisk." she'd said, teasing his smile._

_"Stand mixer, actually." he'd corrected, her gauged reaction paying off. "I'd let you verify with my design team but they're passed out on the couch."_

_He'd motioned to his right, backed up, and when she'd stepped into the hallway, she'd peered into the living room. On the oversized couch, Ella had been tucked against Walter, covered in confectionary wonderment like the dear man she'd been pressed against._

_They'd been two children exhausted from their bakery shenanigans._

_"Talk about a sugar crash." he'd deadpanned from beside her._

_Make that three._

_She'd laughed again, trying to consider the eight million reasons for this messy trio, but all she could do was turn to him with a question._

_"What happened?"_

_"Cookies. Or an attempt at them." he'd said simply. "Thanks to the Doctor of the house and his new interest in projectiles, what started out as ten dozen tasty morsels, are now stuck to my person, your neice and any open-face surface of the poor defenseless kitchen."_

_She thought for a moment, before her smile grew bigger._

_"Walter started a food fight?"_

_"Or as he called it, the "war of genetically modified metabolic inhibitors"."_

_She'd rose a brow, before noticing the powder smudged at the corner of his beautiful eye lines._

_"He was high, wasn't he?" she'd questioned and when he laughed, he nodded._

_"Oh yeah." He threw up a hand when her gaze widened. "Don't worry. I told Ella his medication makes him a little crazy." he gestured toward Walter and when his eyes narrowed, his flour streaked cheek arced on after-thought of a memory._

_Olivia looked back on the sleeping brood._

_"And thankfully for us, she's good with crazy."_

_There was an amused twinkle in his eye when he turned to her, a mischievous silver hue under the dusting of powder on the ledge of his eyelashes._

_"She gets that from you."_

_After he'd said this, she turned to him amused. Then he drew himself into her airspace, paralleled his body to hers when he stepped a little closer._

_"How was the meeting?"_

_She'd closed her eyes on the question, the dull headache of quartly expense reports still rapping on the edge of her inattention._

_"Ugh, you know, boring and uninteresting, as usual."_

_Her arms found her sides as his crossed his messy chest._

_"So in other words, a huge waste of time."_

_She rocked on the balls of her feet._

_"Yeah."_

_That silver grew to gunmetal as he looked at her, a mysterious gleam that turned his eyes dangerous like the rolling of a calm sea._

_And it'd crashed into her nerves, splayed across her calm to send her senses into an uproar, and for an instant, she felt inherently self-conscious._

_And remarkably exposed._

_Sharp metal dug into her palm, the keys in her hand protesting the heat he'd encroached on her skin, the relentless altering of her composition that begun weeks ago in her apartment, to stake its claim five nights ago in their doorstep kiss._

_He asked her if she wanted a drink, and though she knew the safe bet was to decline, she accepted with an urgency she surprised herself with._

_After he lead her into the kitchen, she took in the sight. On the floor, cupboards, and even ceiling, there'd been a mess of sticky dough colored goop, hiding under sporadic covers of flour and sugar, swung from measuring spoons and utensils that littered the countertop._

_"You weren't kidding." She'd said to him, making her way to the only stool at the island not violated. "It's a pigsty in here."_

_She heard him laugh as he'd opened his cup cabinet. Then he'd wiped sticky traces from the door handle with the towel he'd slung over his shoulder._

_"Lucky for us, we still have clean glasses."_

_He presented them to her, one in each hand, and when she grabbed them, he brushed off the textile before her to reveal countertop beneath._

_She set them down and he poured from the bottle he just plucked from the fridge._

_She likes scotch cold, she told him this once at a bar in sum humdrum town, and he'd feigned mock disgust as he'd argued her preference._

_But Drambuie chilled her glass then, though he couldn't stand any ice in the already hard bite._

_Before she'd even taken a swig, she felt her cheeks redden._

_He kept it cold for the nights he found her at his door._

_"Your toast." He'd said, and propped his elbows on the table when he sat across from her._

_"Okay." She thought for a second, taking in the atmosphere and his dough stained sleeves. Then she raised her glass and he followed suit._

_"To craziness and its inevitable chaos." She offered._

_"And the monstrous clean-up that follows."_

_He added, and they both laughed at this, clanked the tumblers together before downing the alcohol._

_She finished first and saw his face contort, in both appreciation and sting, and when he dropped his glass on the table, the dimmer lights wrapped him up in a halo of white-light._

_And she feared for a second, that he was gleaming again._

_But then he shifted, and she breathes easier._

_He commented on the mess, or the day, or his father, but she could only take in his in-front-of-her glory, his silent personified amazing-ness she'd attached to every thought of the secret that she'd buried in her skin._

_In a not-meant-for-him world, his reality, right then, had overwhelmed her._

_In the same undeniable way it had been lately._

_So she reached out her hand, and touched his face, frictioning away the congealed confection at the corner of his mouth with her thumb._

_And she'd let her touch linger for seconds too long._

_This stunned him, as it seared a prickling heat through her, and as his eyes became a dark blue fire, they enraptured her, burning every part of her body not touching his skin._

_She bit down on her sensory knee-jerk reaction, and through some almighty grace, she found the strength to drop her hand._

_She didn't want to hurdle over what safe-zone they'd had left._

_If there'd been any left at all._

_She'd thought of words to say, in the aftermath of the tension humming through her veins, but he settled her struggle._

_"How long are we going to not talk about this? About what's happening between us?"_

_His stare was half-lidded, orbs of tourmaline smoldering in darkness and desire, spiraling her reflex response into a hodge-podge of perplexity._

_She couldn't grab on to sound thought._

_She hadn't meant for that talk that night, hadn't wanted his invitation for her honesty, because no matter what she'd have said, he'd never get her full confession._

_Secrets make the worst of sinners. And guilt cries for retribution._

_She'd been too selfish to deserve the want that invaded her; his magnetism bound to the raw side of her soul._

_He leaned in closer in response to her silence._

_"I'd say it's inevitable at this point, wouldn't you?"_

_There was a thickness clouding her mind, a pre-panic of his meaning, and she couldn't decide if he was referring to their talk or what could come of it._

_"What's inevitable?" She questioned, her voice soft, hoarse and beaten down from her body's violation._

_An inner secret drew up the corner of his mouth, a slow, methodical grin that held the same breath-taking mystery as his eyes._

_An intrigue she never knew till months later._

_Because Rachel will call at that moment, and Ella will wake, and they'd again be behind the line that they kept tip-toeing over._

* * *

The whiskey cantor is remarkably smooth, thick cool-at-the-touch aged glass she's running her fingers down the sides of, her thumb's up the front of.

This is a careful attention she's paid since she parked at his curbside, plucked up the libation and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Without aim, she picks at the white label, paper and adhesive that stick to the underside of her fingernail as she leans her back against the passenger side door.

Alcohol eases nerves, they say, so she's whittling down anticipation with this careless redecoration, calming the anxious thump under her ribcage by condensing night air with a long, steady breath.

In her hands is a twenty-three dollar liquor store excuse for visiting him at this hour and in every other part of her, is the overwhelming certainty that brought her here to begin with.

Happiness, the kind she has to create for herself, is fifteen paces in-front of her behind a wood and glass paneled front door.

And she's about to cross it, find for herself what she saw in the eyes of Alice Merchant, what she feels is lingering and hiding below the surface of her self-ridden angst every time she's alone with him.

So fuck fate and its grappling, grimy hands that bleed and bruise what lonely future its predetermined for her.

She's at no one's mercy but her own.

And she's over the self-inflictions that's kept them apart. There's no salt left to press into_ that her's_ sharp, jagged cuts. It disappeared with her own relentless self-spite and ruthless self-misery.

There's only healing now. And it starts with her knuckles knocking on his door.

When he answers, he's surprised, taken aback by the visitor and this late night hour.

"I'm sorry, I thought you were Walter," he explains, and as the hall lights engulf him, wrap him up in a two a.m illumination of white-yellow, excitement ambulates her nerve-ends, anticipation that shoots here-there-and-everywhere beneath the surface of her skin.

Light becomes him, in any way, shape or form, by now she knows this, but she still bites her lip on the beauty that's racing her erratic pulse.

She's hotly aware of this physical reaction to her showed-up here motivation, so she rocks back on her heels to cage what primal instinct has her pinning him to the foyer wall.

"Oh, is he missing?" she asks him conversationally, almost awkwardly against her own air of intention.

_He stayed down in New York_, he tells her this, and when he frowns, asks if she's all right, she's overcome by another certainty that's pushed into her airspace.

She can't feel the remnants anymore, of that fake _her_, there's no whispering presence lingering in the crevices of this doorway.

It's as if, through sheer will, she's erased all traces, banished them to the same abyss as her pre-decided black-hole of a destiny.

It's solely hers to make of it, her future, and she knows exactly what she wants from it.

A chance at the standing before her personified glory he heats every inch of her flesh with.

She's never known true desire until this moment.

"I might be being presumptuous." She holds up the whiskey bottle, "But I was thinking maybe..."

Intrigued, he nods, "Yeah, sure, I'll get us some glasses."

And he does, setting them on the same island that a year ago, he'd left her scrambling for words at.

_It's inevitable,_ he'd said to her, covered in hard dough and mystery. Even then he'd known chance would lead them here, to an early morning rendezvous disguising what they've never said aloud.

Love binds what's led astray, creates all that's worthwhile. Can give a purpose to two fucked up disasters blindly running after monsters in dark places.

Love is the beauty he'll forever be haloed with.

"To disaster nearly averted." He says, raising his glass, and she smiles, "Or at least postponed."

Her eyes don't leave his, as she sips the liquor, not until she's overwhelmed by inert tenderness, the flecks of gold in grey-green that tear her eyes back to her glass.

There's a stillness enveloping her, a quiet calm she never feels unless he's violated her airspace with his enviable patience.

A promise too, breathes life into her blood, a silent assurance she's stolen from his magnetized-by-her field, a sinking into her of the happiness she begs for, harbored right beneath the seven layers of his skin.

He recognizes what this moment could be.

He's waiting to show her what beautiful feels like.

And she's finally ready to ask.

"Peter, what you said to Mrs. Merchant..." She takes a breath over the electrons firing at every end of her personal spectrum. "I want what you want."

He smiles at her, a curving of his lips that tailspins that calm into a mass hysteria, a rage of heat that shoots from her finger-pads to pool between her pelvic bone.

"What do you think we should do about that then?"

Either lust has no individualization, or on every plane of existence, they're too entwined now for her to tell the difference.

There's no need for distinction now anyway.

Only re-iteration of the desire she sees in his eyes, what she feels beating, wild and crazily, under her sternum.

The beauty his every single cell is composed of.

So she kisses him, a passion borne of what she is and what he's made her, of who they are together and what they could be. This honey flavored press of thin flesh against thin flesh, is a seal to a promise she made walking up to his door.

They're going to make it unscathed after all, in the aftermath of depravity and loneliness, running un-phased anymore from the carnage of that fake _her's_ everything.

His glorious light circumvents her nothingness, finds and rescues her from all her dark places.

A savior for a savior.

His tongue parts her lips as he presses her into him, a flavor of whisky, promise and salvation that plays with her taste-buds to magnify her want for him.

Then she pulls back, in urgent need for the breath that's somewhere in his lungs now.

He kisses her, one last time, before she opens her eyes.

After this kiss, he wasn't glowing, there was no glimmer now to make her question the fears in herself. There was only Peter. Stunning and beautiful, holding her future in the palm of his hand.

Her happy is in the taste of his swollen lips. He put it there, and she's holding on to it.

"Am I glowing?" he asks her, and she shakes her head, smiles.

"No." she tells him, more certain now then ever that knocking on his door tonight was the best choice she's ever made.

For him she'd forsake all others, and she'll show him the depth of such virtuosity.

Love brings hope to the damaged and broken.

And every once and a while, on the rarest occasion, it even has the power to correct completely, what was deemed unmendable.

And so help her god, she felt whole again, in the way his stare becomes half-lidded, she feels her veins come alive, so she takes him by the hand, leads him up the stairs, emphasizes her need for him between bed sheets and the moonlight.

Because love becomes the damaged and broken, is painted on bedroom walls in shadows of passionate creatures once caged, set free to ravage and devour.

In the afterglow of found secrets, freckles and scars discovered in a frenzy of slick skin, love is two souls colliding on every plane of every universe.

Love has become them. And lying here, ragged and spent, under his covers and on top of his chest, she couldn't ask for more glorious proof.

He's undone her completely.

And from now until the end of time, she asks Buddha or God, or William fucking Bell that she can remain under his halo.

Happiness has become her. And she likes the feel of it's warm chest under her cheek, it's steady heartbeat reaching out to her own.

She's addicted to his light, in every illumination of it.

Beauty has become them both.

And she finally knows what it feels like.


End file.
